Each year the institute gives two awards to distinguish two of its students. In 2023, the Best Paper Award went to Tobias Löw, and the Student Award to Hatef Otroshi Shahreza. Congratulations!
Luminous paints make it possible to tell the time on analogue timepieces even in the dark. These compounds are still applied manually, as conventional automation solutions are not suitable for this task. That’s why researchers from Idiap and Bern University of Applied Sciences BFH are developing a flexible robot system that can be programmed by showing it what to do.
Along his team mates, Sylvain Calinon, head of the Robot Learning & Interaction research group, took part in Idiap Create Challenge 2022 edition. Laterna Magica, their smart beamer prototype won the first prize.
Every year, the Institute nominates two students for its internal awards. In 2022, the Paper Award goes to Alexandre Bittar, and the Student Award goes to Teguh Lembono. Congratulations!
The H2020 MEMMO European project, coordinated by LAAS in France, in which Idiap participated as a project partner, has been selected among the 12 best EU projects of the year by the French Research Minister. The award is entitled the 12 stars of Europe 2022 (Les 12 Étoiles de l'Europe). It was selected among 70 selected candidates across all domains.
The Robot Learning & Interaction research group at Idiap has recently acquired a new tool. A small quadruped robot named SOLO12, whose mission will be to allow the researchers and engineers of the institute to develop new robotic applications based on artificial intelligence.
Idiap Research Institute and the School of Engineering at EPFL invite applications for the directorship of Idiap. The successful candidate will also hold a faculty position as full professor at EPFL School of Engineering.
The Institute nominates every year two students for its internal awards. In 2021, the Best Paper Award goes to Suhan Shetty, and the Best Student Award goes to Parvaneh Janbakhshi. Congratulations!
The Robot Learning & Interaction group had several activities during the workshop days of the IEEE ICRA 2021 conference.
The Robot Learning & Interaction group will be presenting a total of six papers at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2021.
The video shows recent experiments with our bimanual robot to insert a thread into a needle by using active sensing techniques.
Collaborative robots are the perfect tool to link art and science. Thanks to his visit at Idiap, a researcher from Goldsmiths University of London used this approach to demonstrate the concept with a piano.
The Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) awarded the best presentation award to Noémie Jaquier. In collaboration with the Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence (BCAI), she presented a paper which highlights how mathematics and machine learning can help to find solutions to problems in robotics.
Artificial deep neural networks are a powerful tool, able to extract information from large datasets and, using this acquired knowledge, make accurate predictions on previously unseen data. Due to the very large number of parameters required, they are also particularly difficult to understand.
Following a comparable path, robots could learn to move and walk as human being do. The goal of the MEMMO project is to develop a unified approach to motion generation for complex robots with arms and legs.
The TACT-HAND project in which Idiap participates was featured in the annual magazine Micro&Nano (p.42-43) from Micronarc, the Western Switzerland Micro-nanotech Cluster:
The thesis presents generative mixture models for learning robot manipulation skills from a few human demonstrations, and providing assistance to a human operator in performing these skills at a distance under limited bandwidth and communication delays. The models are based on invariant task-parameterized representations of hidden semi-Markov models that allow segmentation and reproduction of manipulation skills, while generalizing effectively across different environmental situations such as size, position, and orientation of objects in the environment.
Following a very strict evaluation process – comprising the nomination by Idiap's management and a formal approval by the Scientific College - , Idiap is pleased to announce the promotion of three of its researchers to Senior Researchers:
The Idiap Research Institute develops a new imaging system for research. The precision instrument has been built together with the air base of Sion and could be used by companies and the Universities of Applied Science of the Canton.
The paper of Noémie Jaquier, Mathilde Connan, Claudio Castellini and Sylvain Calinon from Idiap Research Institute and DLR-German Aerospace Center, "Combining Electromyography and Tactile Myography to Improve Hand and Wrist Activity Detection in Prostheses", has been posted on /Technologies/ journal social media platform.
The DexROV team has just completed a 2 weeks long campaign of integration and tests in the DexROV project, with a satellite link established between Brussels and Marseille to enable far distance monitoring and control of an underwater robot.
Dr Sylvain Calinon received the 2017 Best Paper Award of the Intelligent Service Robotics (ISR) journal for his article "A Tutorial on Task-Parameterized Movement Learning and Retrieval".
Thanks to Idiap researchers, the Baxter robot is able to learn from its mistakes.
Nineteen months after the undersea-operations project was launched, DexROV has successfully completed its first funding review as part of the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme.
Best not left alone on the back of a bus
Dr. Sylvain Calinon, head of Idiap’s Robot Learning & Interaction group, receives Romain Boisset, reporter for the Canap9 TV channel. They demonstrate how Idiap’s Baxter robot learns by demonstration.
DexROV is a robot of a special kind. This underwater robot is destined to take the place of human divers for tasks in very deep water (up to 1’300 meters under the sea). The Idiap Research Institute in Martigny is in charge of developing the algorithms that will help teleoperating the two arms of this robot.
In the summer of 2015, Rethink Robotics, the worldwide leader in collaborative robotics research and education launched the Rethink Robotics Video Challenge. The Challenge was created to highlight the amazing work being done by the research and education community with the Baxter robot. The Challenge attracted more than 90 total entries from 19 countries around the globe. The video of Dr. Sylvain Calinon’s Robot Learning & Interaction group of the Idiap Research Institute in Martigny was selected amongst the 10 finalists.
Idiap pursues its development with new scientific research groups. Recently, the institute has acquired an American robot worth CHF 30’000.-. This investment opens new perspectives, in particular thanks to the interconnection between the different domains of competencies developed in Martigny.
Idiap distinguishes two students for their outstanding work
