Stretch Community News - May 2023
Welcome to the Hello Robot monthly community update!
This summer, keep an eye on the Knowledge Base on the Forum for more tips and tricks on how to get the most out of Stretch. You’re also invited to check out our live online workshops on technical topics of interest to the community, happening every few weeks - if you have a specific topic you’d like to see covered in a future workshop, please let us know!
Read on to learn more about some of the great work that the Stretch community has been up to. If you’d like to see your work featured in a future newsletter or on the Stretch Community Repo, please share it with us!
In order to follow open-ended instructions, robots require an understanding of both the scene geometry and the semantics of their environment. Researchers at Meta have released USA Net, a simple method for integrating both the semantics and spatial affordances of a scene in a differentiable map.
The fourth annual Embodied AI workshop at CVPR will take place in Vancouver on June 19 - join the Embodied research community for some exciting presentations, challenges, and discussions about foundation models, generalist agents, sim-to-real transfer, and more!
Researchers from Georgia Tech, Seoul National University, and Meta published a new motion retargeting framework, Adversarial Correspondence Embedding, for translating human movements into semantically equivalent motions for robots with very different morphologies like Stretch.
Stretch was front and center at several conferences in May. UIUC’s Dr. Samuel Olatunji presented A participatory design project to evaluate benefits and workload costs for a domestic assistive robot at the International Symposium on Human Factors and Ergonomics in Health Care; and Dr. Vy Nguyen gave an occupational therapist’s perspective on using robots to assist persons with disabilities at the Robotics Summit and Expo.