The April Project landed on IROS 2022

Close your eyes and try to imagine the soft delicacy of pink petals caressing your skin, and the wind moving the branches of trees filled with flowers. You are in Japan – in Kyoto, to be as specific as possible –, it’s October 23rd and IROS 2022 is happening. We don’t know what your name is, but we as APRIL were there the whole time to present our project.

WHY IROS 2022?

IROS is one of the most relevant worldwide conference focused on robotics research and its future evolutions. It creates an international field for perspective to be exchanged on the matter of automation, innovation and technology in order to give birth to intelligent robots and smart machines. For IROS 2022, the main theme was “Embodied AI for a Symbiotic Society”. 

During such a dynamic and multicultural event, APRIL found the perfect ground to grow into an even bigger project, with more ambitious results to be reached. If other could, why wouldn’t we?

WHAT HAPPENED AT IROS 2022?

We as APRIL decided to rent a booth, which was basically a space were we could exhibit the project’s visual content in order to present it to the people who were at the convention. The number of our booth was 39 and it was supervised by Angela Mazzeo and Matteo Perignano, two of our PhD students.

About Angela and Matteo, their presence at IROS 2022 represented a milestone for the APRIL project, since their two abstracts got accepted at the convention: “A protocol to study the role of deformability in human manipulation when changing task accuracy” and “Proprioceptive filtering in robotics: an application in object handover”.

ROBOTICS, TECHNOLOGY, INNOVATION

Speaking of IROS 2022 and thinking of it in retrospect, we like to consider it a trampoline. Every experience based on confrontation leads to evolution, and evolution leads to innovation, which is the only path when it comes to robotics and technology. 

In regards of the APRIL project, the road seems full of interesting opportunities that we cannot wait to catch up with.