First Australia-France Workshop on Soft and Intelligent Tactile Sensing for Robotics and Autonomous Systems

Robotics is an area where France and Australia have done exceptionally well. However, robotics research has been traditionally seen as purely an engineering discipline and therefore participation from other discipline areas has been lacking. Creating human-like perception and situational awareness for social, service or medical robots integration has become possible with the development of advanced materials and new sensors. A lot of progress has taken place in compact and low power consuming sensors, and the possibilities they offer are countless: soft electronic skin can work as a touch or a proximity sensor, and can be used for intelligent grasping in social, industrial or medical situations. Robotics community has recently identified soft materials and fabrication schemes as one of their grand challenges.

This initiative aims at organizing a two and a half day workshop to address these challenges. It will gather researchers from materials science, neuroscience and robotics for an inclusive discussion required for research methodology development. It is expected that industrial partners from France will also be attending. It involves the Queensland University of Technology, the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision, the Queensland Brain Institute, the Institut Polytechnique de Bordeaux, the Université de Montpellier and the SoftBank Robotics Europe. The workshop will focus on multifunctional organic optoelectronic platform, tactile recognition of objects and active calibration of soft tactile sensors, deep learning techniques to recognise objects, and strategies to exploit haptics for physical human-robot interaction.

Organiser: Ajay Pandey (a2.pandey@qut.edu.au)