The Innovation Booster Robotics was active from 2021 to 2025 as a Swiss initiative supported by Innosuisse. This website is its legacy page. Throughout its duration, the Booster created and strengthened a national community fostering an open innovation culture in robotics. It brought together key players across academia, industry, startups, and public stakeholders to explore new ideas, catalyze collaborations, and accelerate technology transfer and innovation.
Although the Innovation Booster Robotics program has concluded, our mission continues through the Swiss Robotics Association (SRA), a standalone initiative dedicated to serving as a national networking hub for robotics stakeholders across Switzerland and fostering long-term collaboration, visibility, and impact. Visit the Swiss Robotics Association.
L’atelier sur la collaboration homme-robot, tenu le 29 août au Swiss Cobotics Competence Center (S3C) à Bienne, a réuni des professionnels de l’industrie, des chercheurs et des passionnés de robotique. À travers des conférences, études de cas, discussions en panel et séances de groupes, les participants ont exploré les défis et proposé des solutions concernant la gestion des données en robotique. La journée a été structurée autour de quatre thématiques principales : Travail Collaboratif et Apprentissage, Gestion des Données, Collaboration Responsable et Auto-Amélioration des Robots, avec des discussions débouchant sur des idées concrètes pour des projets futurs.

Travail Collaboratif et Apprentissage
Gestion des Données
Collaboration Responsable
Auto-Amélioration des Robots
Ces idées peuvent désormais être soumises pour un développement et un financement supplémentaire via des initiatives telles que IB Robotics et IB Artificial Intelligence.

Date: August 29th, 2024
Location: Switzerland Innovation Park Biel/Bienne (SIPBB facility)
Language : English

Objective:
The Workshop on « Empowering Human-Robot Collaboration » aims to bring together robotics enthusiasts, researchers, and industry professionals to discuss and address the pressing issues surrounding data management in robotics applications. Through keynotes, case studies, and breakout groups, participants will gain valuable insights into tackling data-related challenges in robotics and explore potential solutions.
Agenda:
Challenge 1: Coworking and Learning
Understanding human practices within the context of human-robot interaction is crucial for robots to adjust their behaviors appropriately. However, this presents several challenges. Not only do technical tasks and ethical considerations come into play, but also the fact that different individuals interact in unique ways, making the development of universally applicable algorithms extremely difficult. Furthermore, ensuring precise communication and task allocation in the human-robot workflow is essential, especially considering the proximity between humans and robots.
Challenge 2: Data Management
Most robots work with both filtered and uncensored data, not only for robot training and learning tasks but also directly acquired in-process by physical sensors. Nowadays, tasks such as training may require a large amount of data. This can be challenging in terms of data overload, costs of data analytics integration, and robust data management practices.
Challenge 3: Responsive Collaboration
Both humans and machines occasionally fail at specific tasks, making it essential to consider failure scenarios in developing robust interaction frameworks. By understanding and leveraging failure data, we aim to improve the design, development, control, and robustness robots, ensuring more resilient and adaptive human-robot interactions. To achieve this, we will explore methods for identifying and capturing failure events, analyzing their causes, and utilizing this data to improve the reliability and performance of robotic systems.
Challenge 4: Self-improvement of Robots
One aspect of robustness involves the capacity for a robot to enhance its knowledge and behavior autonomously. This means it should possess a degree of flexibility to adapt and apply abilities to new situations as needed. Achieving this context-driven, adaptive autonomy, which relies on common-sense knowledge and practical manipulation tasks, demands extensive programming and often involves on-platform data management & analytics.
Note: The agenda is subject to change.

