Jonathan and Lee traveled to Japan this week for the 2016 International Symposium on Experimental Robotics (ISER) in Tokyo, where Lee presented his paper, “Improving Stereo Visual Odometry Using Visual Illumination Estimation”, to an enthusiastic crowd of robotics researchers from around the world. We had some great conversations over Japanese beer and fresh sushi, and took in the sights and sounds of Tokyo, narrowly avoiding a typhoon in the process. The next ISER is in Buenos Aires in 2018 — see you there!

Lee won one of six competitive travel grants to attend ISER, and has a cool certificate to prove it!

Lee presenting his paper with the help of some smooth animations.

Roboticists love silly photos.

We visited MDA in Brampton, Ontario today for the 2016 Space Vision and Advanced Robotics Workshop. Jacob presented his work on entropy-based extrinsic sensor calibration, while Valentin talked about first responder localization using foot-mounted IMUs. We took home Second Prize (space pens!) in MDA’s Best Demo competition!

“Infrastructure-free First Responder Localization” won Second Prize in the Best Demo competition!

“Extrinsic Calibration of 2D Lidars Through Entropy Minimization”

We are grateful to NVIDIA for providing the lab with a state-of-the-art Titan X GPU. Looking forward to some cutting edge research on deep learning!

Congratulations to Valentin, who will be presenting “PROBE-GK: Predictive Robust Estimation using Gaussian Kernels” at ICRA 2016 in Stockholm, Sweden! See you there!