The 2018 NRI PI Meeting was held at the Hilton Crystal City at Washington Reagan National Airport located in Arlington, Virginia at 2399 Jefferson Davis Highway on Monday, October 29 and Tuesday, October 30, 2018.
The goal of this meeting is to bring together the community of researchers, industry representatives, and Government program managers who are actively engaged in the National Robotics Program that was launched during 2011 to achieve the following objectives:
- foster awareness and communication between NRI teams, many of whom employ complementary or competing approaches to related problems;
- offer a forum for demonstrating and sharing best practices in education, technology transfer, and general outreach;
- provide concentrated opportunities to share NRI successes with the media and other government agencies; and
- establish a centralized and lasting repository representing and illustrating the research ideas explored by and milestones achieved by NRI projects over the past year.
Keynote Speakers
We enjoyed keynote presentations from Professor Steven M. Lavalle (University of Oulu, Finland) and Professor John J. Leonard (MIT). Professor Lavalle spoke about The Path to (Human) Perception Engineering at 11:30 am on day 1. Professor Leonard presented The Challenges and Opportunities in Autonomy: Lessons From Self Driving Cars at 11:30 am on day 2.