Northeastern’s College of Computer and Information Science was the site of the annual New England Manipulation Symposium (NEMS) on May 22. The event, organized by Robert Platt, an assistant professor in CCIS, brought regional experts in the field together to present recent developments in robotics.

“It reflects the development of research in robot grasping and manipulation,” says Platt of the symposium, which he has attended on and off in the 11 years since its launch. “It used to be that nobody cared about [manipulation] because it was just too hard from a scientific perspective to do. Now, it’s become a central part of what we want to do in robotics, so there’s a lot more interest.”

About 80 people attended the symposium at Northeastern. The daylong event featured 14 presentations, nine posters and three demos, including one from Platt’s own research. Each year, presenters from universities and companies convene to share their latest research about how to get robots to pick up and move unfamiliar objects. Right now, it’s possible to program a robot to pick the same object up from the same spot and move it repeatedly, but the challenge lies in building a robot that can encounter and manipulate an unknown object.

“What you want in reality is you want to have a robot which can pick up objects from any kind of location so that robots are able to use tools like drills,” explains Andreas ten Pas, a Ph.D. student in computer science working with Platt.

If the goal is to have a robot that can help out with daily tasks, the robot needs to be able to interact with its environment independently, according to Platt. “It needs some ability to pick up your shoes without you having to do a lot of programming or without having to supply a lot of parameters about the geometry of your shoes,” he says.

Presenters from Columbia University, MIT and Harvard University, among others, shared their work at NEMS. Topics included Robots that Change the World: Hard Instances of Object Rearrangement, presented by Athanasios Krontiris and Kostas Bekris from Rutgers University, Careful Control of Dynamic Objects presented by CJ Hasson from Northeastern University and Autonomous Door Opening and Traversal presented by Benjamin Axelrod and Wesley Huang from iRobot Corporation.

And while Platt says that the content of the symposium demonstrated breakthroughs in the field, he’s most excited about the demo he presented with ten Pas and Marcus Gualtieri, also a Ph.D. student in computer science. The demo showed a robot encountering a pile of unstructured objects it had not seen before, and picking up and moving items from the pile.

“This is one of the things that we want to do and it looks like we’re just on the verge of being able to do it,” Platts says.