6th International Conference CLAWAR 2003 - Climbing and Walking Robots and the Support Technologies for Mobile Machines
Conference report by Guillermina Martinez
The CLAWAR annual international conference on Climbing and Walking Robots and the Support Technologies for Mobile Machines took place in Catania, Sicily, from 17 to 19 of September 2003. My attendance was a valuable experience both during and after the event. I was able to compare my work with that of my peers in the field, several of whom were interested in my project. This makes me feel confident about my work so far and direction I am taking in the future.
Although it is a very specific conference on climbing and walking robots, it covers such a wide range of disciplines that three simultaneous tracks were running each day in addition to the poster presentations. I organized my schedule before hand to attend the most relevant topics to my work so that I manage to attend the majority of the important speeches. Mornings were the best time because one is fresh and ready to follow consecutive twenty minutes presentations, afternoons were full of informal talks between presentations. It was amazing that the most creative comments to my work came from informal chats between oral presentations. Maybe the informality of the conversations encourages people to talk to you directly and openly, or perhaps a certain level of confidentiality can be achieved through personal conversations!
After attending several plenary sessions and technical presentations, I was sure that the quality of a presentation is based on its simplicity and understandability. It was much appreciated whenever slides were self explanatory, not full of equations (that people hardly read) or complicated and presenting every last detail. Once the general idea has been transmitted, the audience could ask for specific details.
Two major divisions can be made to classify topics presented in the conference, from the organizers and from the type of work that was presented. The type of work was presented might be classified as practical, theoretical, and pure review. If one was inexperienced to a specific area, the pure review articles were the best, but they don't actually presented any advance to the field, however some were on the state of the art. Theoretical presentations were full of mathematical background for modeling robots.
The most impressive were the practical presentations, when the theoretical approach has been vindicated by some real word application. Hearing the comments from people who have confronted the eternal problem of transferring simulations to real world was very interesting.
From the organizers division, topics were grouped as:
- Biological Inspired Systems
- Design Methodology
- Applications
- Medical Systems
- Modularity and System Architecture
- Control of CLAWAR
- System Modeling and Simulation
- Micro-Robots
- Biped Locomotion
- Climbing Robots
- Gait Generation And Stability
- Multi-Legged Locomotion
- Sensors
- Actuators
- Navigation
- Sensor Fusion
A plenary session titled: "A Framework for a Walking Robot
Vision System" by M.A. Lewis, on the first day of the conference,
made a good reference frame for vision in robots and provided
some context for my paper, which was presented in almost in the
last session of the conference. My paper's title was "Investigation
into the performance of an algorithm for deriving concise descriptions
of optic flow fields for real-time control". I received many
positive comments about my project, the novel the approach I am
using and also the specific results I presented.
Robot exhibition and LEGO and CLIMBING robotic competitions also took place during the conference, were researches and companies had the opportunity to shown their walking robots actually .... WALKING! ....
I would like to thank the Royal Photographic Society Imaging Science Group for the award of the Research Student Travel Grant which enabled me to travel to Sicily for CLAWAR '03.