WORKSHOP on VISION  FOR  ROBOTS        

   Sunday August 6th, 1995

   The Westin William Penn Hotel, Pittsburgh, PA 15219

                 in conjunction with International Conference on 
                 Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS-95), 
                 Aug 7-9, 1995.

General Chairman:     Katsushi Ikeuchi  (Carnegie Mellon Univ.)
Program Chairman:     Avi Kak           (Purdue Univ.)

Program Committee:
                      Minoru Asada      (Osaka Univ.)
                      Peter Allen       (Columbia Univ.)
                      Ruzena Bajcsy     (Univ. of Pennsylvania)
                      Akio Kosaka       (Purdue Univ.)
                      Martial Hebert    (Carnegie Mellon Univ.)
                      Seth Hutchinson   (Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
                      Charles Thorpe    (Carnegie Mellon Univ.)


It could be said that the proof of the pudding in building a computer vision
system is to demonstrate it on a robot.  After all, in order to make a robot
do anything useful through the use of its vision sensors, the vision system
must work with some degree of competency and robustness, not to mention the
fact that in addition to scene interpretation the vision system must also
yield information for the pose calculations needed for subsequent robotic
manipulation.  Over the last decade, a number of research groups have
actually demonstrated robotic vision systems for both the arm robots and the
mobile robots.  For the case of arm robots, researchers have demonstrated
bin-picking of non-polyhedral objects using 3-D vision systems.  And, for
the case of mobile robots, researchers have demonstrated navigation modules
using monocular and binocular vision.  The aim of this workshop is to bring
together people who have some experience with the integration of vision
systems with robots, both the arm robots and the mobile robots. Discussions
at the workshop will focus on defining more sharply the current
state-of-the-art in the design of such systems.  We will also try to
delineate the next frontier of experiments for this kind of research.  

More specifically, in addition to reviewing the progress in the design of
integrated robotic vision systems, the workshop will address a host of
technical questions that appear highly relevant to the field. For example,
while for bin-picking applications we have had great success with 3-D
vision, nothing comparable can be said for 2-D vision.  Can any lessons
learned from 3-D vision be applied to crack the problem of 2-D vision?  For
the case of mobile robot in indoor environments, is it better to use
precompiled models of the environment, or should the robot construct such
models using its sensors?  What are the geometry vs. topology tradeoffs for
the representation of models for mobile robot navigation in general?  What
are the best algorithms for pose calculation?  Where do we stand in bridging
the gap between the closed-loop systems for visual servoing and model-based
systems for scene recognition?  What about the use of motion cues?  How
successful have been the concepts of purposive vision? 

PAPER SUBMISSIONS:

Four copies of the full paper including figures and drawings (double-spaced,
not exceeding thirty pages) must be received by Mar 1, 1995 to the Program
Chairman.

IMPORTANT DEADLINES:

Submission of papers:                           Mar  1, 1995
Acceptance notification:                        May  1, 1995
Submission of final camera-ready papers:        Jun  1, 1995