Bay Area Robotics Symposium (BARS 2022)

Last Friday, I attended the Bay Area Robotics Symposium (BARS 2022) in the International House at Berkeley. BARS is a local symposium that brings together faculty and students from Berkeley, Stanford, UC Santa Cruz and other local universities along with attendees from local companies. Autodesk was a sponsor this year. BARS alternates every year between Stanford and Berkeley - BARS at Stanford last year was the first time I'd gone to an in-person event since the pandemic. 

BARS 2022 was a blast! It was one of the most enjoyable conferences I've been to in a while. The talks and posters at the conference tend to be cutting-edge work that's fresh off the press or even under review. This year's conference had a rapid-fire cadence to it with strict time limits on how long each person could speak (even for the faculty!). The result - we got to see a fantastic overview of the incredible research being done in the Bay Area academic robotics community. 

I'll start with the two Keynote talks later in the day: Eric Paulos and Robert Full from Berkeley. Eric talked about Robotics and Design and I was surprised to see a picture of Autodesk's Robotics Lab pop up in his talk showing work done by a resident in Pier 9! Eric's talk was all about creating more intuitive ways for robots to help the design process but along the way he shared several fascinating facts about new ideas that are actually older than we think. E.g. Eric showed the "Aspen Movie Map" - very similar to Google Street View but created by Michael Naimark in 1978! If you're interested in design and robotics and how the two can come together in an intuitive way, don't miss the recording of this entertaining talk. Most of the videos are on the Youtube above in my post.

Rob Full then gave an incredible talk about trying to understand the locomotion abilities of squirrels (yes, squirrels!). One of the slides was titled "Parkour Landing Robustness"! This talk is worth watching just for the footage of squirrels jumping around on branches, adjusting their jumps and also learning quickly as the researchers posed challenges to them. But the science and analysis behind it is equally informative with an eventual goal of building squirrel like robots. Again, watch the video - the two keynotes were among the best I've ever seen at a conference.

Apart from the keynotes, other faculty, sponsors and students presented short few minute talks. The breadth of research showcased here was mind-blowing. A few of the highlights:

• We got additional glimpses of the Tesla Optimus robot - Tesla was a sponsor at the event. This robot will be closely watched by both the academic and industrial community as it develops further. 
  
  
• Ken Goldberg from Berkeley showing off SpeedFolding - currently the world's fastest laundry folding robot. I was at Willow Garage when Jeremy Maitin-Sheppard (one of Pieter Abeel's students) first worked on laundry folding using a bunch of towels - he did all the experiments at Willow on the other side of the wall from my office so I had a ringside view of how hard this is. The technology has certainly gotten better but we're still a long way off from a real laundry robot!
  
• Ousamma Khatib from Stanford giving an update on OceanOne - an underwater dual-armed manipulator. This robot looks uncannily human and has demonstrated a remarkable ability to do two-handed tasks. I've been following this robot for a while - the polished videos of the robot moving underwater and manipulating objects on the ocean floor are a testament to the incredible history of robots coming out of Ousamma's lab!
  
• Jitendra Malik from Berkeley, a doyen of Computer Vision, talking about legged robots and what they're able to do in the real world using a single camera - he also managed to troll Stanford along the way in his delightful talk. 
• Allison Okamura showing off what is possible using soft robots - the applications of this technology are still in their infancy but almost sci-fi-ish in their abilities. 
• Sergey Levine's ideas about pre-trained models for robotics and reusable data (with a little nod to the PR2 robot in his presentation)
  
• An intriguing presentation by Alex Bayen on regulating traffic flows using autonomous cars synchronized to each other across lanes. Maybe this will be the first real application of autonomous vehicles on the road!
• DenseTact from Monroe Kennedy of Stanford showing a new type of tactile sensor capable of high-resolution sensing for both touch and force. 
• A system for Long-horizon manipulation tasks from Jeannette Bohg. This included some neat ideas about differentiable simulations.   
• An innovative use of NERFs from Mac Schwager to do simulation - first time I've seen NERFs used in this way.

The icing on the cake for me and Nic Carey (another researcher from Autodesk) was to go see BAIR (the Berkeley AI Research)  lab and the AutoLab space in there thanks to Ken Goldberg where we also ran into Jitendra Malik. It's a beautiful space with 10s of faculty and 100s of students - reminded me a lot of the GRASP Lab at Penn (Ken and me are both ex-Graspees). It's wonderful to see the explosion of interest in Robotics both in academia and industry - the Bay Area is clearly a hotbed for both. For those of us who've been doing this a while, it's springtime in robotics and it only gets sunnier from here!!