IEEE’s International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) is always a hot bed of robotic activity and this year’s meeting in Alaska was no exception. Among the many exciting presentations was Stanford discussing their recent foray into extreme autonomous driving with their robot car Junior, and Willow Garage announcing the winners of its robot give away. While there’s not an official ICRA 2010 video, Willow Garage did provide a great montage of this year’s event featuring lots of cool new bots and some old Singularity Hub favorites like Nao, WAM, and the PR2. Check them out below.

I love events like ICRA because you get to see how truly diverse the field of robotics has become. Along with humanoid bots, robot arms, and automated cars, this year also saw Intuitive Surgical, makers of the DaVinci robot surgeon system, sponsor an award for best research in medical robots. The winners included papers on wireless microbots, cardiac catheters, robot force fields (can’t wait to read that one), and a technique for teaching surgical robots to repeat motions faster and smoother than humanly possible. That last was from the Abbeel Lab at Stanford, who recently taught a Willow Garage PR2 robot how to fold towels. There’s still a lot of great news coming out of this year’s conference, so stay tuned to Singularity Hub as we bring it your way. And we’re always looking for an insider’s perspective, so if you made it up to Alaska and have any pics or videos from ICRA 2010 make sure to pass them our way!

[image credit: ICRA]
[video credit: WillowGarage]
[source: ICRA]