This year ICRA 2016 program offers a number of educational tutorial lectures.

Their goal is to enhance the interaction and foster collaboration among researchers by providing a venue of highest education for young researchers with the opportunity to listen to, and actually closely interact with senior experts. This innovative tutorial program of ICRA 2016 targets at ensuring that the highest quality content is conveyed in terms of education and exchanging ideas among the members of our community.

Each tutorial will have a duration of half day and consists of a series of distinguished lectures covering both the foundations and advanced subjects of the topics of interest. They will be held after the main conference on Friday, May 20th, 2016 and they will take place at the main conference venue.

The following 6 high-profile tutorial topics given in three parallel tracks will be covered:

Time and Location

Room A1 Room A2 Room A3 8:00-12:30 Vision for Robotics Medical Robotics Aerial Robotics Lunch 13:30-18:00 SLAM Learning from Demonstration Control Architectures for Robotics and Automation Systems

Tutorial Abstracts

T1: Aerial Robotics (Chair: Vijay Kumar)

Abstract: This tutorial provides an introduction to the theory and practice of aerial robots, with a mix of fundamentals and application. It will expose participants to the state of the art in robot design, mechanics, control, estimation, perception and planning with lectures on Multirotor aircrafts, Fixed wing aircrafts, Low power, low cost platforms, Visual odometry, Sensor fusion for state estimation and Aerial Manipulation.

T2: Control Architectures for Robotics and Automation Systems (Chair: Davide Brugali),

Abstract: Autonomous robots are versatile machines equipped with a rich set of software functionalities, typically deployed on a distributed computing infrastructure with stringent resource constraints, for interacting purposefully and in real-time with an open-ended environment through sensors and actuators. For these systems, a critical component is the control architecture. This tutorial will provide insights on several Robot Software Architecture aspects including modelling and analysis, hardware and software co-design approaches and long-Term autonomy.

T3: Medical Robotics (Chair: Allison Okamura),

Abstract: This tutorial will provide an introduction to medical robotics, with a focus on surgery and image-guided interventions. The first and second parts of the tutorial will describe the design, kinematics, and control of successful minimally invasive surgical robots that are controlled via a teleoperation or cooperative manipulation by the surgeon. The third part of the tutorial will focus on image-guided interventions and how medical imaging is integrated with robot design and control. The fourth part of the tutorial will describe the broader spectrum of medical robots, including rehabilitation and prosthetics, with the aim of introducing the commonalities and differences between various medical robot applications.

T4: Learning from Demonstration (Chair: Aude Billard)

Abstract: This tutorial will provide an introduction to techniques used to program robots through human demonstrations. It will include an overview of existing techniques and present different interfaces (haptic device, motion sensors, vision, speech, etc.) available to teach robots. The second part of the tutorial will then take a more lecture-format and present in depth a set of techniques to teach position and force-control tasks. Attendees will be able to practice these techniques through computer-based simulations, using an external haptic device to convey position and force to the simulated robot.

T5: SLAM (Chair: Wolfram Burgard)

Abstract: This tutorial targets to provide an introduction and details to several techniques and algorithms in SLAM. Graph-SLAM, efficient incremental smoothing, Feature-Based Visual SLAM and Direct real-time SLAM are some of the main topics to be covered by the lectures of this tutorial.

T6: Vision for Robotics (Chair: Francois Chaumette)

Abstract: Vision for robotics has given rise to an incredible amount of research and successful applications from the creation of the fields of robotics and computer vision several decades ago. The aim of this tutorial is to provide a comprehensive state of the art on the basic concepts, methodologies and applications. It will thus be devoted to the modelling of visual sensors and underlying geometry, object detection and recognition, visual tracking and 3D localization, and visual servoing, closing the loop from perception to action.