Connecting with the Robotics Community and Celebrating Open Science: The IntechOpen Journals Highlights from ICRA 2023

IntechOpen Journals team joined more than 6000 attendees at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2023 (ICRA).  The largest scientific conference and exhibition in the field, this year’s theme was: “Embracing the Future: Making Robots for Humans”. Exhibitors and workshops spanned topics from wearables, vision, autonomy, intelligence and healthcare.

The IntechOpen stand was busy. The Journals team, led by Natalia Reinic Babic, Head of Journal Publishing and Open Science, met with many members of the robotics community face-to-face, connecting with researchers who were new to IntechOpen and looking to share their research, as well as with established members of the IntechOpen network. These included a meeting with Miguel A. Olivares-Mendez, Head of the Space Robotics Research Group (SpaceR), where the team learned about his group's work in orbital and planetary robotics, and the opportunity to catch up with robotics expert and long-term friend of IntechOpen, Hiroshi Ishiguro as well as his Geminoid.

University of the Arts London's Hooman Samani,  Editorial Board member for the ACRT journal, stopped by to discuss plans for a special project on Creative Robotics he’d like to start in the fall. Gabriele Ferri, who recently published an IntechOpen book chapter, looked forward to collaborating with the Journals team on a positioning paper and sharing datasets from the METRICS project. The team welcomed Aniket Bera of Purdue University as a new Editorial Board member for the ACRT journal.

Highlights of the conference

IntechOpen’s journal portfolio proved an excellent fit for ICRA attendees.  The focus on research that impacts the advancement of humankind is core to our journal, AI, Computing and Robotics Technology (ACRT ) and strongly present across the ICRA sessions (for example, David Hanson on Humanistic AI and Robotics and Will Jackson or Engineered Arts Ltd on Realworld applications for humanoid robots). This fit extended across the portfolio, with exhibits and talks closely aligned to Digital Medicine and Health Care Technology and Green Energy and Environmental Technology.

The event demonstrated how rapidly technology is advancing, from Stelarc’s performance art, focussed on extending the capabilities of the human body, to the multiple robots on display, drawing and dancing, or operated by AI.

There is potential for these developments to transform multiple areas of medicine and healthcare in highly sophisticated ways. Hugh Herr, (MIT) gave a plenary talk, The Design of Bionic Limbs: The Science of Tissue-Synthetic Interfaces, presenting a digital nervous system designed to artificially control paralysed musculature for the restoration of motor function for persons with limb pathology. Simone Crea (The Biorobotics Institute) revealed the pre-habilitative and rehabilitative potentials of lower-limb exoskeletons for sustainable ageing. As well as new technologies, new approaches are being adopted. Heike Vallery, (TU Delft), is using subtractive design to explore the use of robotics to empower individuals with motor impairments and Jessica Burgner-Kahrs, (University of Toronto Mississauga) argued for the use of open approaches. Through rapid prototyping and iterative design The Open Continuum Robotics Project is accelerating the development of new technologies and treatments in medical robotics.

The sustainability theme was put forward strongly by Josie Hughes, EPFL  (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), in her session on Deploying Robots in Agri-food from Farm-to-Fork, Tim Brackbill, Tortuga AgTech, who spoke on Essential Robotics: Designing for Application and by Yaro Tenzer, RightHand Robotics in his Agrifood Robots keynote, From Research to Revenue: My Personal Journey Navigating the Commercialization Path.

Promoting Open Science at ICRA

ICRA marked the announcement of IntechOpen’s implementation of the Figshare platform, giving authors a streamlined way to share their open data and make it findable, citable and accessible. The IntechOpen Journals are committed to Open Science, and ICRA provided a platform to promote the benefits to an engaged audience. An innovative on-stand tool allowed attendees to assess their knowledge and access recommended information to support them on their journey.

Following the announcement, Mark Hahnel, Figshare founder and CEO, joined Natalia and Kaveh Bazargan of River Valley Technologies at the IntechOpen -  Open Science Caffe Networking Event for a panel discussion on open data. It is a trending topic, particularly in the robotics research community, where researchers commonly leverage technologies and practices that support this approach, using GitHub and preprint servers, for example. 

Mark touched upon the specific benefits of open science in robotics as well as future trends widely commenting:   "I think the next step is making the data that we have well described, better metadata, so we can feed it to the machines and they can do a lot of the heavy lifting for us. You know it’s like chess - humans and machines together will beat the machine and will beat humans. So we need to apply that to the academic research, and a way to do that is get Open Access content into the machines, Open Data into the machines, in a way that they can understand: “Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable” and then have that used as the baseline for the paradigm shifts in research. So that’s what I am excited about."

Kaveh pointed to the specific challenges of future-proofing and ensuring ongoing access: "Make your data Open but ensure that it is in an Open standard. If you have a proprietary spreadsheet for example, and the software that reads it is not there in fifteen years' time, you can’t read that data. We need to get rid of dependency on any non-open or proprietary software in order to read and to build on that data."

Both experts highlighted the importance of ongoing education to make things as easy as possible for busy researchers, which is the goal of our ongoing series of Open Data Webinars. 

Stay in touch

If you weren’t able to join us at ICRA 2023 you can find out more and explore valuable content on open data and the IntechOpen Journals at  icra2023.intechopen.com

If you have any questions about IntechOpen Journals or would like to get involved with Open Science by publishing with us, we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch.