RSS (Robotics Science and Systems) Atlanta 2007

The Robotics Science and Systems Conference for 2007 just took place in Atlanta. This was the third RSS and consolidates its position as a primary consistent venue for robotics research. The 3-day meeting, as usual, features a number of 1-hour presentations from well-known invited speakers combined with 30-minutes talks on submitted papers chosen via a very selective and extensive review process.

Due to multiple cancelled flights I missed the beginning of the conference, but heard several very good presentations. There was a bias towards papers with a computational or algorithmic flavor, which is a trends in the robotics research community as a while, but one which the RSS organizers hope to minimize in favor or broad coverage of all the relevant research areas.

Ken Goldberg gave a great banquet speech on his work with technologically-inspired art. This took place at the Atlanta aquarium, which has some spectacular displays. As part of his presentation he briefly played some musical renditions of seismic recordings, and the beluga whales in one of the tanks really responded!

Noah Cowan gave an "early career" presentation on work he has done (partly with Bob Full) on building control-theoretic models of simple organisims like cockroaches and electric knifefish. This is great work and both relevant and refreshing for much of the audience.

At an evening organizing meeting it was confirmed that the next RSS will be at ETHZ in Switzerland at around the same time of year (which we hope will be the date to be used every year for RSS).