Program

The summer school will be organized into lectured courses, practical courses and complementary talks about current leading-edge research topics. During the school, the students will have the opportunity to attend expert lectures and participate in a variety of challenging and exciting practical sessions. These hands-on development sessions will be chosen from key research areas (e.g., robot navigation, exploration, mapping and localization, manipulation), and will allow the students to learn and implement state-of-the-art algorithms for solving various problems, with the use of tools from the Player Project. The results of the school will be made publicly available to the community as open source software, through the Player Project.

The school will begin with an introductory module on Player/Stage/Gazebo followed by focused modules on simulation and modeling, feature extraction and data interpretation, model learning, action selection/task allocation and planning.

Each day, a lecturer will give a talk about one of the above mentioned topics in the morning, with implementation-oriented practicals and more advanced lectures following in the afternoon. The students will be allowed and encouraged to work in teams during the entire duration of the summer school.

Preliminary program: (1) - 13 Aug - Introduction
  • [08:30-09:00] Introductory talk: Michael Beetz

    The video can be downloaded as a single file by clicking here (XVID, 540x300, 25fps).
  • [09:00-11:15] Lecturers: Brian Gerkey, Richard Vaughan
    • Brief introduction/keywords: P/S/G Usage. Clients. Robotics basics (and more): localization, path planning, navigation, collision avoidance, perception, etc.


    The video can be downloaded as a single file by clicking here (XVID, 540x300, 25fps).
    The slides of Brian Gerkey's lecture can be downloaded by clicking here (PPT, ~3MB).
  • [11:15-11:30] Coffee break
  • [11:30-12:30] Invited talk: Wolfram Burgard (Probabilistic Techniques for Mobile Robot Navigation)

    The video can be downloaded as a single file by clicking here (XVID, 540x300, 25fps).
    The slides of Wolfram Burgard's invited talk can be downloaded by clicking here (PPT, ~16.5MB).
  • [12:30-14:00] Lunch break
  • [14:00-18:00] Lab activity

(2) - 14 Aug - Player concepts
  • [09:00-11:15] Lecturers: Brian Gerkey, Richard Vaughan, Radu Bogdan Rusu
    • Brief introduction/keywords: Drivers and Interfaces, Automatic discovery of services


    The video can be downloaded as a single file by clicking here (XVID, 540x300, 25fps).
  • [11:15-11:30] Coffee break
  • [11:30-12:30] Invited talk: Rachid Alami (On some decisional issues for human-robot interaction)

    The video can be downloaded as a single file by clicking here (XVID, 540x300, 25fps).
    The slides of Rachid Alami's invited talk can be downloaded by clicking here (PPT, ~13.5MB).
  • [12:30-14:00] Lunch break
  • [14:00-18:00] Lab activity

(3) - 15 Aug - Simulation and Modeling
  • [09:00-11:15] Lecturers: Richard Vaughan, Nate Koenig
    • Brief introduction/keywords: Stage - 2D Simulations, Gazebo - 3D Simulations


    The video can be downloaded as a single file by clicking here (XVID, 540x300, 25fps). The slides of Nate Koenig's lecture can be downloaded by clicking here (PDF, ~0.5MB).
    The slides of Richard Vaughan's lecture can be downloaded by clicking here (PDF, ~1.5MB).
  • [11:15-11:30] Coffee break
  • [11:30-12:30] Invited talk: Richard Vaughan (In-Your-Head simulation)

    The video can be downloaded as a single file by clicking here (XVID, 540x300, 25fps).
  • [12:30-14:00] Lunch break
  • [14:00-18:00] Lab activity

16 Aug - Free day

(4) - 17 Aug - Feature Extraction and Data Interpretation
  • [09:00-11:15] Lecturers: Kurt Konolige, Selim Ben Himane, Radu Bogdan Rusu
    • Brief introduction/keywords: laser sensors, vision, WSN, RFID
    The slides of Selim Ben Himane's lecture can be downloaded by clicking here (PDF, ~1.5MB).

    The video can be downloaded as a single file by clicking here (XVID, 540x300, 25fps).

    The video can be downloaded as a single file by clicking here (XVID, 540x300, 25fps).
  • [11:15-11:30] Coffee break
  • [11:30-12:30] Invited talk: Darius Burschka (Visual IMU -Abstraction and Fusion of Data from Feature Correspondences)
  • [12:30-14:00] Lunch break
  • [14:00-18:00] Lab activity

(5) - 18 Aug - Model Learning
  • [09:00-11:15] Lecturers: Odest Chadwicke Jenkins, Darius Burschka
    • Brief introduction/keywords: learning environment models static/dynamic, action models, SLAM
    The slides of Odest Chadwicke Jenkins's lecture can be downloaded by clicking here (PDF, ~2.3MB).

    The video can be downloaded as a single file by clicking here (XVID, 540x300, 25fps).
  • [11:15-11:30] Coffee break
  • [11:30-12:30] Invited talk: Kurt Konolige (Simple models for laser and visual mapping)
  • [12:30-14:00] Lunch break
  • [14:00-18:00] Lab activity

(6) - 19 Aug - Action Selection/Task Allocation
  • [09:00-11:15] Lecturers: Richard Vaughan, Brian Gerkey
    • Brief introduction/keywords: multirobot coordination, behaviors
  • [11:15-11:30] Coffee break
  • [11:30-12:30] Invited talk: Kasper Støy (Cognitive Robot Bodies)
    The slides of Kasper Støy's invited talk can be downloaded by clicking here (PPT, ~4.8MB), and here (TBZ movie archive, ~95MB).
  • [12:30-14:00] Lunch break
  • [14:00-18:00] Lab activity

(7) - 20 Aug - Planning
  • [09:00-11:15] Lecturers: Kurt Konolige, Michael Beetz, SICK AG presentation
    • Brief introduction/keywords: path planning, low-level planning, high-level AI planning, schedulers
  • [11:15-11:30] Coffee break
  • [11:30-12:30] Invited talk: Auke Jan Ijspeert (Online learning of locomotion control using systems of coupled oscillators for robots with multiple degrees of freedom)
    The slides of Auke Jan Ijspeert's invited talk can be downloaded by clicking here (PDF, ~6.9MB).
  • [12:30-13:30] Lunch break
  • [13:30-14:00] Lecture Susanne Ihsen (Diversity as a key to professional success)
  • [14:00-18:00] Lab activity
[Note: The social program details will be added soon.]

As our demonstration and practical platforms, we will use intelligent sensor-equipped environments for cognitive robotic assistants, as well as teams of robots for multirobot coordination and exploration tasks.

PSSCR'07 will be an opportunity to participate to lectures held by the core developers and maintainers of the Player project.

Lectures and talks will be given by:

Navigation