Workshop Description:

Robot platforms come in different flavors and sizes, yet for complex and interactive systems such as autonomous driving and swarm robotics, smaller sometimes is better. Miniature platforms such as Duckietown, F1Tenth, AutoRally, and RACECAR, while initially used for education, have recently matured to full research platforms. The low cost and small scale of these vehicles have enabled the deployment and demonstration of novel algorithms ranging from game-theoretic racing to cooperative perception. These platforms provide researchers a method for testing and experimenting without the cost or safety risks of full scale platforms, allowing for faster deployment, testing, and evaluation. For multi-robot systems and distributed swarms, smaller physical sized robots have enabled researchers to evaluate algorithms on increasingly larger team sizes. These larger sizes have allowed the community to explore the limits and efficacy of distributed and communication-constrained algorithms as team membership increases.

In this workshop, we will bring together experts and researchers with experience building small-scale testbeds for full-size research problems. The objective of the workshop is to discuss the practical challenges of such platforms, hardware & software design considerations, and the research potential of these platforms. We will discuss how scaled platforms have enhanced our scientific understanding of real world deployment and the limitations of state of the art algorithms. In addition, during this workshop we'll discuss current limitations of purely simulation or full-scale robot platforms for research and industry, and the role hardware plays in bridging the sim-to-real gap. Applications from self-driving cars to UAVs to swarm robots will be highlighted in the workshop as examples of full-scale problems using small-scale research platforms for research and development.

Topics of Interest

• Miniature robot platforms

• Micro robotics

• Multi-robot systems

• Challenges of robot evaluation and benchmarks

• Sim-to-real gap

• Robot education platforms

• Autonomous racing

• Cooperative robotics

Call for Papers: Call for papers are closed.

Schedule: Check out the schedule for the day!

Financial Sponsors

Questions? Contact the organizing committee at

email: iros-22-mini-robots@mit.edu