Santiago, Chile and Robotics Summer School

In late December I acted as a plenary speaker at the EVIC Robotics Summer School in Santiago Chile. The Summer School seemed good with a nice selection of talks and poster presentations. In particular I visited the lab of Javier Ruiz-del-Solar at the Universidad de Chile. They have a large team there that is going a lot of very interesting work including walking humanoid robotics, robocup systems, hardware design, robotic mining applications and algorithm development.

Santiago itself seemed prosperous and interesting, but not as exciting from a tourist point of view as some of the outlying regions of Chile, which has a diverse set of different climates and ecosystems. While there I took a quick trip to the town of San Pedro in the Atacama desert, one of the most dry places on Earth. If I find time, I might post some photos eventually.