[alife] Extended deadline - IROS workshop on micro-nano robotic swarms for biomedical applications

Sabine Hauert sabine.hauert at bristol.ac.uk
Fri Jul 4 05:23:10 PDT 2014


Micro-Nano Robotic Swarms for Biomedical Applications
IROS Workshop, September 14 2014, 8:30am-5pm, Chicago USA
Website: http://nanoswarm2014.org
Video teaser: http://youtu.be/MKIuEbDNkEk

We accept submissions of one-page abstracts to be presented as posters
during the workshop. The best poster will be awarded the NanoSwarm $500
cash prize.

To encourage cross-disciplinary synergies, we look forward to contributions
from many different fields, including micro-nano robotics, medical
robotics, fast prototyping, and swarm robotics.

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Important Dates
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Jul 14 (extended): Deadline for short abstract submission
Jul 23: Notification of acceptance
Sep 14: Workshop, poster sessions and awards

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Big Picture
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Bioengineers are currently designing micro-nano systems for the treatment
and monitoring of diseases. DNA machines, synthetic bacteria,
nanoparticles, and magnetic materials are now able to move, sense and
interact in a controlled fashion, an affordance that has led them to be
called robots. These robots will need to be deployed in large numbers and
operate predictably in highly complex biological environments. For
instance, trillions of nanorobots would be needed to deliver drugs to a
tumor or yield a visible signal for sensing. Toward this end, the field of
swarm robotics offers tools and techniques for controlling large numbers of
agents with limited capabilities. The challenge is to design swarm robotic
strategies that produce collective behaviors that are useful for biomedical
applications. This will require advances in high-resolution understanding
of biology, micro-nano robotics, fast prototyping of experimental
environments, systems modeling, simulators to explore swarm strategies, and
scalable control at the micro-nano scale.

In this fast-paced workshop, attendees will hear from experts in medicine,
bioengineering, micro-nano robotics, and swarm robotics. A poster session
will encourage interactions in an informal setting. Finally, we will
brainstorm challenges and opportunities in micro-nano swarm robotics during
a closing panel discussion.

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Speakers
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Guillermo Ameer - Northwestern
Aaron Becker - Harvard
Spring Berman - ASU
Sabine Hauert - UoB
Vijay Kumar - UPenn
Sylvain Martel - EPM
Brad Nelson - ETHZ
Mike Rubenstein - Harvard
Daniela Rus - MIT
Taher Saif - UIUC
Selman Sakar - ETHZ
Metin Sitti - CMU
Rob Wood - Harvard

The full program can be found here: http://nanoswarm2014.org/program/

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Submission
---------------------
To encourage interactions and discussion, we will hold two
cross-disciplinary poster sessions throughout the day. Posters will be
accepted based on a one-page abstract submission. Please use the official
IROS LaTex or MS Word templates (
http://ras.papercept.net/conferences/support/support.php) and send the
final PDF to submissions at nanoswarm2014.org by July 14.

Topics of interest include, but are in no way limited to:
- biomedical applications for micro-nano systems
- high-resolution monitoring of biomedical systems
- fast prototyping of microenvironments
- micro-nano robots
- unconventional robots (DNA devices, nanoparticles, synthetic bacteria,
bio-bots)
- synthetic biology
- fabrication and manipulation at the micro-nano scale
- energy-based robot control (magnetic, light-based)
- self-organizing biological and robotic systems
- control of swarm robotic systems
- large-scale simulations of swarm systems
- tools to explore swarm behaviors (bio-inspiration, crowdsourcing, machine
learning)

More information about submissions can be found here:
http://nanoswarm2014.org/call-for-papers/

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Award
---------------------
The best poster will receive the NanoSwarm $500 award based on feedback
from a panel of judges from different disciplines.

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Organizers
---------------------
Spring Berman, Arizona State University, USA
Sabine Hauert, University of Bristol, UK
Sangeeta Bhatia, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
Bradley Nelson, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Vijay Kumar, University of Pennsylvania, USA


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