A Taste of Oriental at the China Restaurant
Our students took a long trip, starting with a cab from the campus to the port, a ferry, two connecting flights, a cab to the hotel the next day early in the morning, and another cab to the ADNEC site for IROS2024, followed by a full-day workshop. Never travel with an empty stomach, and it’s time to have a good meal. Two of our members were so tired that they had to return to the hotel for a good sleep and recharge. No worries, as we bought them some nice Fried Rich and Noodles to carry on through the night~
Thanks to Xudong’s excellent taste of choice, we found this boutique dining place, the China Restaurant, with more than 40 years of history in Abu Dhabi. It was great chatting with the restaurant owner, an elegant Chinese lady who has lived in Abu Dhabi for over 30 years. We also had a great experience receiving service from the Indian gentleman on the food and Chinese tea. It has fantastic decoration and exquisite ceilings maintained since 1994, bringing us back to Jacky Chen’s movies through time with the delicious and familiar taste of Chinese food. It seems Abu Dhabi has much more to offer than the desert and sea seen on the plane’s map.
Look Forward to the Next Day
Besides the above activities, our members listened to many great talks and met some old friends. During the registration, we ran into Mr. Chen Jianming from NOKOV, who will organize a dinner session with many colleagues the next day. We later found out that NOKOV was also a sponsor of the Workshop we participated in today. Some of us joined Prof. Sami Hadaddin’s talk on a brief history of force and motion control. Prof. Haddadin is also an organizer of the MSVC competition. Running into Prof. Tan U-Xuan from the Singapore University of Technology and Design was also great. Good luck to U-Xuan and the researchers in Singapore who are running to co-host IROS in 2028.
Dr. Guo and Xudong were lucky to run into Perte So in Hall 5, one of the organizers for the euRONBIN MSVC competition @ IROS2024. We confirmed our timeslot for testing our robot, which will be on Wednesday morning. Good luck to team DLRG with the on-site competition and demonstration ~
Tomorrow
The next day, Haoran and Dr. Guo will attend the Workshop on Benchmarking via Competitions in Robotic Grasping and Manipulation in the morning. They will present our CopGNN solution used for the ICRA 2024 Cloth Manipulation competition, which is also part of the euRONBIN project. Please refer to this link to learn more about our solution during the competition. Last week, Prof. Wan also presented the research version of our solution at WAFR2024 in Chicago, USA. Feel free to drop by our poster stand for feedback and discussion ~~~
