Technical Tours

To explore the inspiring atmosphere of the San Francisco Bay Area, three technical tours are offered during IROS 2011. Tickets are issued at a rate of $20 per tour on a first-come-first-serve basis and are offered at the conference registration desk in front of the Continental Ballroom. Cash and credit card payments are accepted.

1. Monday, September 26, 9:00–13:00 — University of California, Berkeley
2. Friday, September 30, 9:00–16:00 — Adept Technology and Willow Garage
3. Saturday, October 1, 9:00–15:00 — Stanford University

Monday, September 26, 9:00–13:00 — University of California, Berkeley

The University of California was chartered in 1868 and its flagship campus was established at Berkeley. Today UC Berkeley is the world's premier public university, according to the annual rankings by U.S. News & World Report, and Berkeley Engineering maintains top rankings among engineering programs nationally, public or private. The tour will include visits of the Biomimetics Millisystems Lab (Fearing), the Lab for Automation Science and Engineering (Goldberg), the Hybrid Systems Lab (Tomlin), the Mechanical Systems Control Laboratory (Tomizuka), the Robot Learning Lab (Abbeel), the Center for Collaborative Control of Unmanned Vehicles (Hedrick), and the Tele-Immersion Lab (Bajcsy).

Schedule

Friday, September 30, 9:00–16:00 — Adept Technology and Willow Garage

Adept Technology, Inc. is a leading provider of intelligent vision-guided robotics systems and services. Founded in 1983, Adept Technology is the largest U.S.-based manufacturer of product lines including industrial robots, mobile robots (AGVs), configurable linear modules, machine controllers for robot mechanisms and other flexible automation equipment, machine vision, and systems and applications software. Adept provides specialized, cost-effective robotics systems and services to high-growth markets including Packaged Goods, Logistics, Life Sciences, Disk Drive/Electronics and Semiconductor/Solar; as well as to traditional industrial markets including machine tool automation and automotive components.

Willow Garage is a company dedicated to designing personal robots, developing open source robotics software, and advancing the open source personal robotics community. Willow Garage has developed a hardware platform called the PR2 (Personal Robot 2), and an open source software platform called ROS (Robot Operating System). The ROS software that Willow Garage contributes is BSD-licensed, making it completely free for anyone to use and change and free for other companies to commercialize. A major goal is to enable robotics innovation and ensure that the adoption of robotic technologies is a transparent process with positive societal impact. Willow Garage actively engages research labs and companies as partners, collaborators, customers and advisors in the development of both their hardware platform and open source software, and also supports researchers who would not otherwise have the bandwidth or funding to open source their work.

Schedule

Saturday, October 1, 9:00–15:00 — Stanford University

Stanford University is a private research university located in the heart of Silicon Valley. Stanford has a vibrant research and teaching program in the field of robotics, distributed in the Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, and Bioengineering Departments. Research projects on intelligent systems and robots are conducted in the labs of David Camarillo, Mark Cutkosky, Oussama Khatib, Jean-Claude Latombe, Andrew Ng, Allison Okamura, Bernie Roth, Ken Salisbury, Sebastian Thrun, and Ken Waldron. The tour on the Stanford campus will include visits to several laboratories in different departments, highlighting current research in autonomous robots, human- friendly robot design, bio-inspired robots, haptics, and medical robotics. We will provide hands-on and interactive demonstrations, and show collaborative spaces that facilitate interdisciplinary robotics research. Lunch will be served during the campus tour.

Schedule