I spent the past week in Anchorage, Alaska for the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. The weather was excellent for almost the entire trip. Despite the ice in the above photo, it was very pleasant to be out and about. Josh and I took a walk down by the water shortly after arriving on the first day.
Alaska
The conference banquet was originally planned to be on a train which would go through the mountains as dinner was served. But the train filled up and us late registrants didn’t get tickets. Instead, there was an alternate banquet at the Alaska Native Heritage Center. Before dinner, we walked around outside and heard presentations from several native Alaskans.
Also present were several mushers and their dogs.
Alaska was fun to visit. It did take me a couple of days to get used to the fact that it was light out until pretty late at night, and then light again pretty early in the morning. I could probably get used to that, but would have a hard time in the winter when it’s almost constantly dark.
ICRA 2010
At the conference itself, I presented two papers, Robot, Feed Thyself and An Electric Field Pretouch System for Grasping and Co-Manipulation. Both talks went pretty well.
I also saw lots of pretty cool robot stuff. It’s always fascinating to see what other research is going on in the field. Several groups brought hardware to demo. I was really excited to see the completed PR2 beta hardware which looks like it would be really neat to work with. I make extensive use of the Willow Garage ROS software, so it’s always really cool to see what the developers are doing with it and find out about new and useful components that we can integrate into our own systems.
