Course at a Glance

The course will be held on 10-19 of March, 2020 at the Grand Hotel Arenzano, Arenzano, Italy

Important: due to the evolving coronavirus (COVID-19) situation the school has been postponed. New dates will be notified as soon as possible.

Autonomous robots are becoming increasingly more capable thanks to the continuous development of: better hardware for sensing and actuation, powerful algorithms for control, and machine learning and perception. Each of these technologies is often developed independently from the other, though their integration is required to solve the challenges to deploy advanced robots outside controlled environments.

The aim of this school is to give students an overview of the state-of-the-art on the broad field of robotics. To this purpose, we aim at teaching students the required, practical, skills that allow them to program robots taking advantage of available tools and libraries for perception, control and machine learning. We propose to use humanoid robots as testbeds because they offer unique opportunities to study many of the problems that are relevant to the field of autonomous systems.

This school will cover the following topics:

Software architectures and middleware for robot programming
Tools and best practices for software integration and concurrent development
Components orchestration using finite state machines & behavior trees
Optimization, robot kinematics and dynamics for whole body control
Robot vision and deep learning
Neuromorphic sensors and event-driven vision
Reinforcement Learning

This school is an evolution of the Veni Vidi Vici (VVV) iCub summer school, which started in 2006. With respect to the original format, the program has been revised to dedicate more hours to frontal teaching and enriched by invited talks. In addition, students will be given sufficient time to build practical programming skills thanks to extensive hands-on sessions on software simulators and real humanoid robotic platforms. Two iCub humanoid robots will be available to the students, equipped with a cluster of computers and GPUs in a dedicated LAN.

Participants are expected to have a background in robotics and to know computer programming languages (i.e. C++ and Python) and tools (i.e. GIT). They should also bring their own laptop to attend hands-on sessions.

The website of previous schools including program and material can be found here: VVV18.

Basic Info

Venue

The school will take place at the hotel Grand Hotel Arenzano in the beautiful town of Arenzano, located in the Riviera di Ponente section of the Ligurian Riviera, not far from the city of Genoa in the North of Italy.

Schedule

The school will begin in the morning of the 10th and will finish in the evening of the 19th. Sunday 15th will be free (participants are encouraged to visit Genova or the riviera nearby).

Accommodation and Food

Accomodation, lunch and dinner will be served at the Grand Hotel Arenzano and are included in the school fee (with the only exception of the lunch on Sunday which will NOT be included).

Subscription and Fees

The school is targeted to PhD and Post-Docs, but we also accept applications from MS students at the last years of their studies and research engineers working in robotics. Applicants will be selected competitively based on the application material (research statement/motivation letter, CV and support letter) and the potential benefit she/he will gain from the participation.

Applications are closed, notification of acceptance and registration instructions will be circulated soon (see below).

The fee includes the school, food (full board, with the exception of Sunday 15 in which only dinner will be provided) and accomodation at the Gran Hotel Arenzano for 11 nights (from Monday to Thursday night):

Shared room: 1500 euro
Single room (depending on availability): 2000 euro

Accomodation in shared room will be in double rooms.

Applicants from countries outside Italy can apply for travel grants thanks to the EU project TERRINet. Travel grants wave the school fee and include support for travel.

To apply to the travel grant: it is sufficient that you select the corresponding option in the first page of the online application form (no need to apply through the Terrinet web page). In the research statement please state why you apply to the grant and how you will benefit from attending the school.

For any inquiries, please write to lorenzo.natale _AT_ iit.it

Application deadline: Jan 8^th 2020

We received a large number of appications, for this reason we had to delay the notification of acceptance

Notification of acceptance: Jan 15 Jan 17^th 2020

School resources website

School's wiki, instructions for participants, robot booking etc.:
https://vvv-school.github.io/vvv20

Program

Important: due to the evolving coronavirus (COVID-19) situation the school has been postponed. New dates will be notified as soon as possible.

The following is a high-level schedule of the school. The program is still preliminary and may change.

Mon 9/3	TIME	SUBJECT	TEACHER	FILES
	18:00 - 19:30	Check your installation. Optional for those who are already at the hotel and would like to check their laptop and software installation.	ALL
Tue 10/3	TIME	SUBJECT	TEACHER	FILES
	9:00 - 9:15	Welcome and introduction	Lorenzo Natale
	9:15 - 13:00	Software middleware for robotics.	Lorenzo Natale
	13:00 - 14:00	Lunch
	14:00 - 18:00	Hands on: The YARP middleware	Lorenzo Natale
	18:00 - 19:00	Students presentations
	20:00 -	Dinner
Wed 11/3	TIME	SUBJECT	TEACHER	FILES
	9:00 - 13:00	Hands on: the YARP middleware	Lorenzo Natale
	13:00 - 14:00	Lunch
	14:00 - 18:00	Optimization and Robot Kinematics	Ugo Pattacini
	18:00 - 19:00	Evening Talk: Robots that learn to move: why, when, and how? [abstract and bio]	Jean-Baptiste Mouret
	20:00 -	Dinner
Thur 12/3	TIME	SUBJECT	TEACHER	FILES
	9:00 - 13:00	Vision for Robotics and Deep Learning	Alessio Del Bue and Pietro Morerio
	13:00 - 14:00	Lunch
	14:00 - 18:00	Hands on: vision and deep learning	Vadim Tikhanoff
	18:00 - 19:00	Evening Talk: Motion Control for Legged Robots: Robustness, Viability and Hardware Design [abstract and bio]	Andre Del Prete
	20:00 -	Dinner
Fri 13/3	TIME	SUBJECT	TEACHER	FILES
	9:00 - 13:00	Optimization and Robot Kinematics	Ugo Pattacini
	13:00 - 14:00	Lunch
	14:00 - 18:00	Hands on: robot kinematics	Ugo Pattacini
	18:00 - 19:00	Evening Talk: Artificial haptic intelligence for human-machine systems [abstract and bio]	Veronica Santos
	20:00 -	Dinner
Sat 14/3	TIME	SUBJECT	TEACHER	FILES
	9:00 - 13:00	Robot Dynamics & whole-body control	Daniele Pucci
	13:00 - 14:00	Lunch
	14:00 - 19:00	Hands on: whole-body control of a humanoid robot	Daniele Pucci
	20:00 -	Dinner
Sun 15/3	TIME	SUBJECT	TEACHER	FILES
	9:00 - 19:00	Day off. Notice that Lunch today is NOT included in the fee. Dinner will be served at the hotel as usual.
Mon 16/3	TIME	SUBJECT	TEACHER	FILES
	9:00 - 13:00	Neuromorphic sensors and Event-driven vision	Chiara Bartolozzi
	13:00 - 14:00	Lunch
	14:00 - 19:00	Hands on: Event Driven Vision	Arren Glover
	20:00 -	Dinner
Tue 17/3	TIME	SUBJECT	TEACHER	FILES
	9:00 - 13:00	Reinforcement Learning	Geri Neumann
	13:00 - 14:00	Lunch
	14:00 - 18:00	Hands on: reinforcement learning	TBA
	18:00 - 19:00	Evening Talk: Disentangled 3D Representations for Performance Capture of Humans [abstract and bio]	Sean Fanello
	20:00 -	Dinner
Wed 18/3	TIME	SUBJECT	TEACHER	FILES
	9:00 - 10:30	Bulding complex behaviors with FSM and Behavior Trees.	Michele Colledanchise
	11:00 - 13:00	Behavior Trees: hands-on	Michele Colledanchise
	13:00 - 14:00	Lunch
	14:00 - 18:30	Putting it all together: an integrated demo	Group Work
	20:00 -	Dinner
Thur 19/3	TIME	SUBJECT	TEACHER	FILES
	9:00 - 13:00	Putting it all together: an integrated demo	Group Work
	13:00 - 14:00	Lunch
	14:00 - 17:30	Putting it all together: an integrated demo	Group Work
	20:00 -	Social dinner: Goodbye and farewell	ALL