ICRA 2025 Workshop on “Towards Human Level Intelligence Vision and Tactile Sensing”
This is the official website for “ViTac 2025: Towards Human Level Intelligence Vision and Tactile Sensing”.
Abstract: This is the 6th time for us to organise the ViTac workshop in the ICRA conferences, after ICRA 2019, 2020, 2021, 2023 and 2024 ViTac Workshops. It will also be timely for us to report conclusion of the Special Issue (now called Special Collection) we have organised on Tactile Robotics at the IEEE Transactions on Robotics. The recent trend in embodied intelligence, i.e., intelligence that requires and leverages a physical body of a robot, demands rich physical interactions with the surrounding environment, which cannot be achieved without perception of the environment with vision and tactile sensing. Recent years have seen rapid advancements in tactile sensor development, integration of information from visual and tactile modalities, leveraging vision and tactile sensing in agile grasping and manipulation, and simulations that involve both vision and tactile sensing. It will be timely to bring together the experts and young researchers in the field to discuss these important topics in robotics. This proposed full-day workshop will cover the recent advancements in the area of visuo-tactile sensing and perception, with the aim to empower robots with visual and tactile intelligence. It will further enhance active collaboration and address challenges for this important topic and applications.
Date: Friday 23rd May, 2025 (8:30 a.m. – 5:30 p.m.)
Location: Georgia World Congress Center, Atlanta, USA (room to be confirmed)
For past ViTac workshops, please check ViTac2024, ViTac2023, ViTac2021, ViTac2020, ViTac2019.
Organisers:
Shan Luo, King’s College London
Nathan Lepora, University of Bristol
Wenzhen Yuan, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Rui Chen, Tsinghua University
Hao Su, University of California San Diego
Kaspar Althoefer, Queen Mary University of London
Gordon Cheng, Technische Universität München
Invited speakers:
Jitendra Malik, University of California at Berkeley
Jan Peters, Technische Universität Darmstadt (TU Darmstadt)
Mark Yim, University of Pennsylvania
Lerrel Pinto, New York University
Yu She, Purdue University
Daolin Ma, Shanghai Jiaotong University
Wenbo Ding, Tsinghua University
Katherine J. Kuchenbecker, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems
Industry panel:
Rich Walker, CEO of Shadow Robot Company
Heba Khamis, CEO of Contactile
Zaki Hussein, CEO of TouchLab
Yuan Dai, CTO of Astribot
Key dates:
Posters and live demonstrations will be selected from a call for extended abstracts, reviewed by the organisers. The best posters will be invited to talk at the workshop. All submissions will be reviewed using a single-blind review process. Accepted contributions will be presented during the workshop as posters. Submissions must be sent in pdf, following the IEEE conference style (two-columns), to: shan.luo@kcl.ac.uk, indicating [ICRA 2025 Workshop] in the email subject.
Submission Deadline: 15th March, 2025
Notification of acceptance: 30th March, 2025
Camera-ready deadline: 15th April, 2025
Workshop day: Monday May 19th or Friday May 23rd, 2025
Topics of Interest:
● Development of tactile sensors for robot tasks
● Simulation of tactile sensors and Sim2Real learning
● Visual-tactile sensing and perception
● The control and design of robotic visuo-tactile systems for human-robot interaction
● Interactive visuo-tactile perception in robot grasping and manipulation
● Cognitive control of movement and sensory-motor representations with vision and touch
● Bio-inspired approaches and cognitive architectures for the visuo-tactile perception
● Computational methods for processing vision and touch data in robot learning
Tentative Schedule
| Time | Speaker | Title |
|---|---|---|
| 09:00-09:10 | Organisers | Welcome |
| Session 1: Development of Touch Sensors - Hardware Intelligence | ||
| 09:10-09:30 | Lerrel Pinto | Versatile Skin Sensing for Precise Manipulation |
| 09:30-09:50 | Yu She | Learning Model Predictive Control for Tactile-reactive Grasping |
| 09:50-10:10 | Wenbo Ding | Visuotactile Sensor with Beyond-Human Sensory Capabilities: A Multi-Spectral Method |
| 10:00-10:30 | Coffee break, posters, and demos | |
| Session 2: Robot Embodiment with Vision and Tactile Sensing | ||
| 10:30-10:40 | Mark Yim | T-RO Special Collection on Tactile Robotics |
| 10:40-11:00 | Jitendra Malik | Touch Sensing for In-Hand Manipulation |
| 11:00-12:00 | Rich Walker, Heba Khamis, Zaki Hussein, Yuan Dai | Industry Forum |
| 12:00-14:00 | Lunch break, posters, and demos | |
| Session 3: Vision and Tactile Sensing for Manipulation | ||
| 14:00-14:20 | Jan Peters | Tactile Skill Learning |
| 14:20-14:40 | Daolin Ma | Multi-Modal Contact Perception for Manipulation Intelligence with Vision-Based Tactile Sensor |
| 14:40-15:00 | Poster Presenters | Lightning Poster Presentations (2 mins each) |
| 15:00-15:30 | ManiSkill-ViTac Challenge | Invited Talk from Challenge Winners |
| 15:30-16:00 | Coffee break, posters, and demos | |
| Session 4: The Future of Robot Embodiment with Visual-Tactile Perception | ||
| 16:00-16:20 | Katherine J. Kuchenbecker | Contact Sensing Complements Visual Perception of 3D Scenes |
| 16:20-17:00 | All Speakers | Panel Discussion |
| 17:00 | Finish |