Conference website: Link

Workshop Objectives

By 2050, the world's population will hit 9.6 billion, necessitating sustainable food systems to manage rising demand and environmental concerns. The fresh food sector, facing fierce competition between supermarket chains and rival competitors and labor expenses, is turning to robots for cost-effective solutions. These robots can handle monotonous and labor-intensive tasks, benefiting agriculture and food production. In particular, using robotic systems as enablers for handling fragile products in the food industry could reduce labor costs, boost productivity, and improve working conditions. Striking a balance between productivity and environmental and ethical stewardship necessitates enhanced interdisciplinary collaborations between industry stakeholders, researchers, and agricultural communities to ensure a sustainable and equitable sound future for the food industry also for low-income countries.
To address these critical issues, this workshop addresses recent robotic tech in the food industry, crucial for meeting food demands and eco-friendliness. It aims to unite early-stage and senior researchers and industry featuring expert talks and as well as opportunities for attendees to share their knowledge and develop new ideas, on enabling robotics in the food sector, fostering innovation, and exploring economic, social, and ethical facets of this field. 

Workshop day: 13th, May, 2024
Time: 9:00 am - 17:00 pm

Topic of interest

Topics of interest to this workshop include, but are not necessarily limited to:

• Soft robotics for food manipulation and grasping
• New materials and smart systems for automating unexplored agricultural applications
• Learning-based approaches for grasp planning and manipulation
• Machine vision and deep learning for precision agriculture
• Enabling technologies for sustainable agriculture
• Sensing in crop monitoring
• Economics, ethics, and environmental aspects of robotics in the food industry
• Sustainable solutions for low-income countries

Organizers

•   Prof. Matteo Cianchetti (primary contact), matteo.cianchetti@santannapisa.it - The BioRobotics Institute, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Italy
•   Prof. Josie Hughes, josie.hughes@epfl.ch - Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Swiss
•   Prof. Shinichi Hirai, hirai@se.ritsumei.ac.jp - Ritsumeikan University, Japan
• Dr. Marija Popović, m.popovic@tudelft.nl - TU Delft, Netherlands

Programme Committee

•   Dr. Martina Maselli, martina.maselli@santannapisa.it  - The BioRobotics Institute, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Italy
• Niccolò Pagliarani, niccolo.pagliarani@santannapisa.it - The BioRobotics Institute, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Italy

Program

Tentative Schedule in Japan Standard Time (JST)

Call for contributions

Contributions should be submitted in the form of max 2-page extended abstract in IEEE Standard US letter format. Authors are encouraged to also submit an optional 1-minute video presentation of their paper. Contributions cannot take the form of an existing paper that is published or under review elsewhere. Novel results, on-going works, large scale projects and conceptual papers are welcome.

The review process is single-blind. The authors of accepted papers will be invited to present their results in a poster session during the workshop, which will be held in-person. Authors are expected to print out and bring their own posters to the workshop. Recommended format is A0 (portrait). There is no specific template for the posters. The papers should be submitted through this link in PDF format.

All accepted contributions will not be included in ICRA proceedings but will be published in a publicly accessible folder on the workshop website.

The evaluation committee will assign two best poster presentation awards:

• “Best soft robotics solution for agri-tech”, 500 $ prize award, sponsored by IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Soft Robotics
• “Best sustainable robotic solution”, 500 $ prize award, sponsored by IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Agricultural Robotics and Automation.

Award ceremony will be held at the end of the workshop.

Important deadlines

Paper Submission Deadline*: 31 March 2024, 23:59pm Pacific Time - 12 April 2024, 23:59pm Pacific Time

Notification of Acceptance:  15 April 2024

*deadline extension

For any questions regarding the submissions process, please contact:

martina.maselli@santannapisa.it and niccolo.pagliarani@santannapisa.it

Sponsorship by

• SoftGrip European Project (GA 101017054)
• IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Soft Robotics
• IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Agricultural Robotics and Automation

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