3rd Workshop on Representing and Manipulating Deformable Objects @ ICRA2023

Clothes, food, cables, and body tissue are just a few examples of deformable objects (DO) involved in both everyday and specialized tasks. Although humans are able to reliably manipulate them, automating this process using robotic platforms is still unsolved. Indeed, the high number of degrees of freedom involved in DOs undermines the effectiveness of traditional modelling, planning and control methods developed for rigid object manipulation. This paves the way for exciting questions from a research and application perspective. i) How to tractably represent the state of a deformable object? ii) How to model and simulate its highly complex and non-linear dynamics? iii) What hardware tools and platforms are best suited for grasping and manipulating? We aim to discuss these and more challenges that arise from handling deformable objects by connecting scientists from different subfields of robotics, including perception, simulation, control, and mechanics. Following the previous editions of the workshop at ICRA 2021 and ICRA 2022, the objective for the proposed third edition is to further identify promising research directions and analyze current state-of-the-art solutions with an emphasis on highlighting recent results since the 2022 workshop. We plan to facilitate this through invited talks and will foster new collaborations to connect young researchers with senior ones.

The workshop was held in hybrid mode

Links:

• InfoVaya: https://events.infovaya.com/event?id=103
• YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQFAnfbQK45enYDr8B0VdKw
• Link to 2nd edition of the workshop: https://deformable-workshop.github.io/icra2022/
• Link to 1st edition of the workshop: https://deformable-workshop.github.io/icra2021/

Call for papers

We invite participants to submit extended abstracts 3+n pages, with n pages (no page-limit) for the bibliography, in the IEEE conference style.

Submissions will be reviewed by experts of their respective field. The accepted abstracts will be made available on the workshop website but will not appear in the official IEEE conference proceedings. Participants are encouraged to submit their recent work on the topics of interest mentioned above. Contributions are encouraged, but are not required, to be original.

The review process will be single-blind, meaning the submitted paper does not need to be anonymized.

Abstracts can be submitted through Microsoft CMT: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/WDOICRA2023.

Important dates (final extension):

• Submission Deadline: 10.04.2023 19.04.2023 (23:59 PST)
• Notification date: 30.04.2023 07.05.2023 (23:59 PST)
• Final submission: 14.05.2023 21.05.2023 (23:59 PST)
• Workshop date: 29.05.2023

IEEE RAS Computer & Robot Vision workshop award

We are happy to announce the WDO Best Paper Award sponsored by the IEEE RAS Technical Committee Computer & Robot Vision. The selected paper will receive a prize of 300$. Any contribution submitted to the workshop will be automatically considered for the award.

Mingrui Yu, Kangchen Lv, Changhao Wang, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Xiang Li. A Coarse-to-Fine Framework for Dual-Arm Manipulation of Deformable Linear Objects with Whole-Body Obstacle Avoidance.