This week I had the privilege of visiting the 11th annual TAROS (Towards Autonomous Robotics Systems) conference, this year hosted by Plymouth University. Unfortunately, I wasn’t in time for the first day of the conference, but I did manage to make the last two days. During the conference I saw a lot of interesting presentations about all the different robotics and techniques currently under development and I got a chance to present my paper and to tell everyone there about the ARGO and all the exciting stuff going on at Aberystwyth.
Although my phone camera is pretty useless (or I am) I did take some photographs and a short video of ‘Robothespian‘ who was on display for the final day of the conference.
During the final day of the conference there was a particularly interesting talk by Mike Smith from Oxford University on ‘Generating Implicit Surfaces from Lidar Data’. Most interesting was a technique he detailed from an earlier paper written by him and his colleges on ‘A generative framework for fast urban labelling using spatial and temporal context’. In essence this was a means of identifying surfaces and giving them labels such as ‘Tarmac’ in real-time. I hope to investigate this more and see if it can be used with the ARGO to help with dynamic surface type identification and control system tuning.
I thoroughly enjoyed the conference this year and look forward to participating again next year (hopefully) – but for now, those interested can find the slides from my talk here. As always, I welcome any comments and suggestions from those present; or anyone else for that matter.