Workshop: Locomotion and Manipulation: Why the Great Divide?

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Getting robots to perform useful work in uncertain environments is still a grand challenge in robotics. One of the biggest possible impacts of this ability would be to enable the development of new co-robots that are nurses, handymen, and butlers for the elderly and infirm. Other important applications would be co-robots that can help find and evacuate the injured during first responses to disasters, improvements in design and control of active prosthetic devices and exoskeletons, and locomotion and manipulation behaviors for collaborative human-robot work. This proposal requests funds to organize a workshop focused on developing new planning and control methods to extend robots? abilities to transport themselves to work sites and then to perform useful physical work. A two-day workshop is proposed to encourage collaboration between the research communities of robotic manipulation and locomotion, both in academia and industry. The workshop is motivated by the fact that, although the underlying physical principles driving locomotion and manipulation are similar, the techniques developed by the two communities are not. The workshop will analyze the reasons for these differences and explore ideas to bring them closer, with the goal of cross-pollinating advances in both fields. In addition, the workshop will consider the impact of industrial efforts to address these problems.