This year 2022 has been the first time that I have attended ICRA, and I had never even remotely expected that it was going to be such an intense and exciting experience for me.
Before starting the conference, I believed that what would interest me the most would be the state-of-the-art robots that are showcased during the conference. I am a researcher in swarm robotics, and I typically work with small educational robots. To me, the ICRA 2022 Science Communication Awards seemed a great opportunity to experience the large ecosystem of robots presented in the exhibitions and the competitions. Since I was not presenting any paper, getting to see amazing robots resulted very intriguing.
However, I quickly understood that there is so much more to just attending the conference. The best part about participating in a robotics venue with nearly eight thousand attendees is, with no doubt, the robotics people. I met talented and engaging people that were open to collaborate, discuss and question pretty much every aspect of robotics. Now I believe that the conference is also much more than the possibility to publish a prestigious article; it is the opportunity to open your ideas, to get enriching feedback, and to contact with a diverse and multidisciplinary group of roboticists.
In ICRA 2022, I collaborated with the Publicity Committee to portrait some curious, interesting, and emotive moments of the conference in a series of video digests. If you missed any, you can find them in my Robohub profile. If you just want to watch some amazing robots in video, you can also go directly to the YouTube playlist that lists them all. I produced the content in both English and Spanish, so a special shout-out to Robohub and Ciencia en el Bar for helping with the outreach. The digests in Spanish are available in my website.
Next year, ICRA is moving to London. I hope to meet you all again there! Maybe while still doing science communication, or maybe while presenting a paper.
Below my last video digest of ICRA 2022, with shots taken during the entire week.
tags: c-Events
David Garzón Ramos is a researcher at IRIDIA, the Artificial Intelligence research laboratory of the Université Libre de Bruxelles.
