Environment Dynamics Matters:
Embodied Navigation to Movable Objects


IROS 2024 Workshop

October 14th, 2024
Abu Dhabi

Introduction

The embodied navigation, which is a typical kind of embodied cognition behavior, has attracted great attention from researchers from the robotics, machine learning, and computer vision communities. In recent years, a lot of machine learning methods are proposed to tackle the embodied navigation problem. Moreover, many simulation environments have been established, which enable the work that originally requires cumbersome physical verification to be conveniently conducted in the simulator and great progress has been made in terms of relevant methods. It is true that the developed machine learning methods could provide effective approaches for the navigation task, while they are restricted to the paradigm of applying the trained model on test scenes, which is hard to adapt to the dynamic environment. In reality, the environment dynamics is ubiquitous and it often occurs that objects we want to find are movable or have some temporal location patterns associated with user habit routines. It is difficult both for existing simulation environments to nicely simulate environment dynamics and for existing algorithms to take advantage of environment dynamics to improve search efficiency. Fortunately, the AIGC and LLM technologies are developing rapidly and becoming mature, which shed light on the above challenges. Besides, there also emerge a series of great research works which take environment dynamics into consideration. Therefore, we believe it could be a perfect time to have this workshop which provides an opportunity to gather researchers to discuss on the topic and further accelerate the development of the field.

Content of Workshop

In this workshop, we aim to emphasize the importance of environment dynamics in the long-horizon embodied navigation and manipulation task. As the environment dynamics is ubiquitous (for example, the same object could have been placed in different places associated with user routines), the robot should consider the movement of the object rather than searching static ones. Given the great challenges brought by the dynamic environment both in the establishment of simulation environment and corresponding algorithms, the tentative content of the workshop is intended to include the following topics.

Call for Papers for this Workshop

Prospective authors are required to submit an extended abstract in the standard IEEE conference template, 2 pages. Abstracts will be reviewed by the organizers. Please note that it is possible to use material that has already been presented in a previous conference. Papers and videos accepted by IROS 2024 can be submitted directly.

Accepted papers will be invited to be presented as posters during the workshop, and the best paper candidates will be invited to give a five-minute talk.

Papers and videos are required to be sent as attachments and links (available for download or watching online respectively) in an email to edmws2024@gmail.com. Please include the author's name and "IROS24 workshop on Environment Dynamics Matters" in the subject line and a clear description of attachments in the body of the email.

Best Poster Award

One best poster will be selected from the submissions and awarded with a certificate and a prize. The winner will be announced at the workshop.

Important Dates

Submission Deadline of Extended Abstract: September 22, 2024
Acceptance Notification: September 30, 2024

Accepted Posters

- Learning to Catch Reactive Objects with a Behavior Predictor (Best Poster)
- Commonsense Scene Graph-based Target Localization for Object Search (Best Poster Finalist)
- PreAfford: Universal Affordance-Based Pre-Grasping for Diverse Objects and Environments (Best Poster Finalist)
- From DeepClaw to MagiClaw: Towards Universal Action Embodiment
- Learning Generalizable Manipulation Policy with Adapter-Based Parameter Fine-Tuning
- NaVid: Video-based VLM Plans the Next Step for Vision-and-Language Navigation
- Reflexive Open-Vocabulary Navigation without Prior Knowledge Using Omnidirectional Camera and Multiple Vision-Language Models
- Manipulation Planning of Humanoid Palm Based on Vision-based Tactile Sensor

Schedule (Tentative)

Time Title Speaker
14:00 – 14:10 Introduction & Welcome
14:10 – 14:50 Robot Learning for Long-Horizon Mobile Manipulation Prof. Abhinav Valada
University of Freiburg, Germany
14:50 – 15:30 Real-time 4D Metric-Semantic Mapping Prof. Luca Carlone
MIT, USA
15:30 – 16:10 Longitudinal Modeling of Grounded User Routine Maithili Patel
Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
16:10 – 16:30 Coffee break & Poster Session
16:30 – 17:10 Interactive Navigation and Interactive Search: Increasing robots capabilities in dynamic human-centered environments Prof. Roberto Martin-Martin
University of Texas at Austin, USA
17:10 – 17:50 Embodied Intelligence with Foundation Models for Mobile Manipulation Dr. Oier Mees
UC Berkeley, USA
17:50 – 18:10 Oral for Best Paper candidates
18:10 Award Ceremony

Invited Speakers



Luca Carlone
MIT

Roberto Martin-Martin
University of Texas at Austin

Abhinav Valada
University of Freiburg


Oier Mees
UC Berkeley

Maithili Patel
Georgia Institute of Technology

Organizers



Huaping Liu
Tsinghua University


David Hsu
National University of Singapore


Di Guo
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications


Tao Kong
ByteDance Research


Abhishek Gupta
University of Washington

Endorsement

IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Algorithms for Planning and Control of Robot Motion
IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Cognitve Robotics
IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Machine Learning for Automation
IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Mobile Manipulation
IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Robot Learning
CAA Technical Committee on Intelligent Automation
IEEE Robotics & Automation Society Supporter Logo

Support

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Contact

For further information or questions, please contact us at edmws2024@gmail.com