No-show policy

If the authors of an accepted paper, either for oral presentation or poster, do not show up at the conference, the respective paper will be excluded from the official proceedings and from IEEE Xplore.

Invited Speaker: Rainer Bischoff, KUKA’s Corporate Research department, Augsburg - Germany
Talk: Designing robot competitions with a benefit for the industry

Abstract: The talk will give insight in how KUKA maintains its leadership in industrial and professional service robotics technology and innovation through collaboration with research institutes and academia, and in particular, by helping to design robot competitions. Competitions in robotics are an excellent vehicle for advancing the state of the art and evaluating new algorithms and technologies in the context of a common problem domain. However, there is no regular and established process of technology transfer of research projects to actual applications of industrial and commercial impact. To seize the opportunities of competitions, several EC projects were launched that specified benchmarking challenges and methods and that suggested ways of evaluating the performance of single modules, subsystems and functions of integrated systems. This talk will present results of ongoing and recently finished projects and shed light on best practices at KUKA in designing and executing competitions with a benefit for the robotics industry and the factory of the future.

Biography: Dr. Rainer Bischoff is Head of KUKA’s Corporate Research department, responsible for research and technology development preceding product development. Dr. Bischoff received his „Doktor-Ingenieur“ degree from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology for his contributions towards the development of personal robots. He serves as Vice-President Industry of euRobotics AISBL – the European Robotics Association he helped to create to unite European roboticists and to engage in a public-private partnership with the European Commission. For leadership and outstanding contributions to the cooperation of academia and industry, and for managing and promoting significant technology transfer in the area of industrial and service robotics he was granted the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Career Award in 2012. In 2015, he received the IROS Toshio Fukuda Young Professional Award for his technical contributions to the personal robotic assistant HERMES and his effort in uniting the European Robotics Community.

Social Program

2016, 5th May - Castle Visit and Conference dinner
A guided tour to the origins of the city of Bragança will take place in the citadel. The focus will be on the Castle, the walls and the nearby monuments "Domus Municipalis", "Pelourinho" and "Santa Maria Church".

2016, 6th May - Environmental Cruise of the International Biological Station on Lake Sanabria
This visit takes place aboard of the first Wind-Solar Catamaran, also certified zero emission, zero effluent, zero waste and zero decibel sound on noise ambient. The visit to the underwater world of this glacial lake will be guided by biologists-divers with underwater cameras and radio communication.