Geometry and Beyond – Representations, Physics, and Scene Understanding for Robotics – RSS 2016

This is a very interesting workshop with very nice perspectives.

Oliver Brock, TU Berlin
„Geometry is dead”
Hanif Kara said „Geometry is dead.” He refers to architecture and structural engineering. In architecture (and computer graphics), researchers explore two alternatives to geometry: one with increased representational expressiveness (parametric surfaces) and one with minimalistic expressiveness (points). I think that in robotics we also started with geometry and recently turned to point clouds as an alternative. I will advocate that we should also explore the parametric route. By “parametric” I do not mean super-quadrics or things like that. I mean parametric relationships in the combined space of action and sensor signals. I will argue that these relationships provide the most natural and adequate representations for manipulation actions and very naturally lead to competent robot manipulation and perception.

See more here