We had the pleasure of attending ICRA 2023, and we wanted to give you 5 bullet points that cover our biggest insights.
- We’re still early in the development of the robotics toolchain. We may be biased, but we’d love to see more software and hardware services being sold to robotics companies. We’re still in the very early stages of this. We were excited to see companies like Viam at ICRA.
- Marc Raibert walked us through the origin and future of Boston Dynamics, and talked about his latest project – forming the AI institute to advance the state of robotics research.
- A lot of posters and presentations at ICRA didn’t mention real-world applications. We’d love to see presentations and posters start with a paragraph on where a given piece of research can be applied. We think this would also help get more research funded by private industry.
- Many standards have not quite been adopted by the industry. An example of this was the IEEE ontology standard, which has been approved for some time but hasn’t gained traction^. We’ve seen a few instances of this, and it seems to create a chasm between research and industry.
- Simulation was notably underrepresented at this conference. Most presentations and papers seem to focus on onboard robotics problems; we’d love to see more simulation-related content.
Not a bullet point, so we didn’t lie. ICRA 2023 had a “social event” on the itinerary, and it was 🔥🔥🔥.
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^Ontologies allow roboticists to make a real world problem machine understandable (footnote, not a bullet point)
