Mind the Gap: Opportunities and Challenges in the Transition Between Research and Industry

Real-world deployability has always been a foundational focus of robotics research. However, over the past 15 years, these ideas have been tested at an unprecedented scale as start-ups; and new efforts in established companies have produced robotics to offer new consumer products, expand business services, and fulfill government contracts. This workshop aims to “back-propagate” the learnings from these efforts to academic researchers across applications, algorithms, hardware, and systems who want to contextualize their work in industry trends. Read More.

The workshop will feature talks by industry veterans across a variety of robotics subfields. Based on their experiences “in the trenches” of productionization robotics research, workshop speakers will concretize, refine, and even refute the notion that industry is meaningfully different from academia through studies, retrospectives, and anecdotes. The discussion will focus on the following topics:

• Retrospectives on Deployments and Running Algorithms at Scale
• Integration of Algorithms and Hardware
• Surprising Real-World Constraints, Pitfalls, and Corner Cases (and ways to avoid them)
• How Users Impact Design Decisions
• The Biggest Challenges Facing Industry over the Next Decade
• Quantitative studies, profiling, and results are especially welcome!

The workshop aims to promote additional discussion around the following questions:

• What are the best ways for industry and academia to work together?
• What robotics problems are best suited for exploration by industry vs. academia? What are overlapping problems that should be tackled collaboratively?
• What are the main gaps in academic research results that need to be “filled in” in order to use them in the industry? How can researchers work to reduce those gaps?

RSVP: https://roboticsconference.org/attending/registration/
Zoom link will be sent out after registration.