- This paper presents our motivation for organizing the FinE-R workshop at IROS 2015, as well as a summary of all accepted papers. The main workshop goal is to provide an open exchange forum to the robotic community where participants can share their personal “failure to success” stories. We believe that such exchanges are of tremendous importance for the community as they provide a rich source of knowledge on how to avoid future mistakes with possible high impact. On the other hand, the papers accepted in the workshop give a good overview of different types of errors encountered in the robotic fields. Through deep analysis and clear description of failures, the authors of these papers contribute to a learning process by extracting positive experiences and conclusions from negative results leading ultimately to success.
Along the history there have been many important
discoveries that resulted from long trials and error processes,
like the ones done for the creation of the electric light bulb by
Tomas A. Edison [
As many other sciences, the path to progress in the field of robotics is not free of failures and caveats. These failures provide valuable lessons and insights on future approaches by analyzing errors and finding methods to avoid them. As such, the robotics community could benefit from the experience of those who had faced and overcome similar failures before.
The objective of this workshop is then to provide an international forum for researchers in robotics and its related fields, where they can share their personal experiences on their "failure to success" stories, to present what they have learnt, what others should avoid while experimenting in similar context, and providing tips for better research practices and for creating more successful robots that meet people's expectations.
Nowadays, in the scientific community only successful
theories and positive results have a chance of being regarded
as true, and then published in prestigious publications,
discarding odd and unexpected findings. However, the
success of these theories does not warrant that they are truth
neither prove their adequacy to realism. Unfortunately, the
current scientific publishing system privileges “successful”
results as it is expected that their research findings will be in
alignment with well-established literature or with expected
outcomes. However, as pointed by [
However, ignoring the huge amount of information that
negative results can provide (which, according to [
Fortunately, the scientific community is becoming aware that negative results are not meaningless and that there is a potential value in sharing also negative results and discussing the lessons learnt after analyzing the failures, as well as in explaining what were the keys to avoid problems and achieve successful results. Some examples of this tendency can be seem in the New Negatives in Plant journal4 that according to their scope is “an open access, peer reviewed, online journal that publishes hypothesis-driven, scientifically sound studies describing unexpected, controversial, dissenting, and/or null (negative) results in basic plant sciences. The journal also consider studies that validate controversial results or results that cannot reproduce previously published data”, or in the new approach supported by the Wealth Health Organization (WHO)5 that has a new policy of publishing, in their peer reviewed journal, results of clinical trials that include also negative findings.
Following such examples and taking into account that the scientist community working in the robotics field can also benefit of following a similar approach, we decided to propose FinE-R (Failure in Real Robots), a workshop in the context of IROS6 (IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems) conference. For this, we decided not only to focus on presenting the negative results obtained while working on real robots, but also on how the researchers were able to extract meaningful lessons from their failures and what kind of solutions they proposed to finally overcome their problems. Then, we made the FinE-R’s call for papers targeting at the following topics: Analysis of failures when participating in robotic challenges. Design of robust human-computer interfaces for robots. Description of problems and solutions faced when failure is not an option, therefore there is the need of creating an outstanding robot from hardware to software. Description of benchmarking and tools for testing and creating robust robots. Description of techniques to avoid common but frequently seen errors when deploying robots for industrial or general public environments. Description of advanced techniques for failure recovery and troubleshooting. Matching the expectations and needs of industries and consumers with the current technology. 4 http://www.journals.elsevier.com/new-negatives-in-plantscience 5 http://www.who.int/ictrp/results/reporting/en/ 6 http://www.iros2015.org Description of alternatives to techniques and algorithms that are prone to fail. Presentation of keys for successful research projects and proposals on robotics. Analysis of failed results and projects when using smart algorithms, well-established techniques or brilliant designs.
These proposed topics not only were in line with the idea of learning from failures, that is central to our workshop, but also allowed to differentiate FinE-R from other workshops that are mainly centered on specific and vertical topics or areas of research. With FinE-R we aim at providing a space for sharing practices and experiences of robot design and construction across multiple disciplines, therefore making the workshop more interesting and open to a wider audience.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that it was gratifying for us to read comments from reviewers of the Workshop proposal about the appropriateness and timelines of an initiative such as FinE-R. Some examples of these are:
“This is a very interesting proposal as learning from failure in real-world applications is an important and essential capability for robots. This is not a topic not well addressed so far. It is very good to see a group of people discussing this”
“This workshop will provide such a unique opportunity that we can learn from not only our own failure but also others. We surely need such a workshop. Topics cover wide ranges. Speakers are from well-known organizations. Suggest leaving more time for discussions.”
In this section we summarize the accepted contributions to the first edition of FinE-R. All submissions went through a single blind review process. In average, all papers received three reviews.
Written by Billesø et al [
This paper, written by Wang et al [
In this paper, Hong Tuan and Cabibihan [
In this paper [
In this paper [
This article [
One problem engineers are often dealing with is the short time schedule they have to make certain assumptions and estimations. This can often lead to troubles in the assembly and testing phase. As such, the spring joint prototype designed by the authors went twice through a cycle of assembly, testing, and redesign before the arriving at the final stage. During this process, the authors mention that they identified three problems and reported five learned lessons from their design experience.
In [
In this paper [
Presented by Fernández et al [
Page 3 to address the analysis and discussion of failures and methodologies when creating or designing robots. The workshop allows for sharing research experiences with scientists facing similar situations and problems. In this paper we also have provided a summary of the accepted contributions, in which the authors were asked to describe their path to success roadmap and to provide clear explanations of what they learnt while deploying their robotic projects that could be of interest for other researchers working in the same area.
Taking into account the quality of the accepted papers, the good response from the reviewers, program committee, and scientific community, as well as the importance that brings doing a deep analysis not only on the successful results but also on the path followed to reach them, as future work, we plan to continue organizing FinE-R in the context of IROS conferences. Our desire is that by keeping open this forum, the expertise of worldwide researchers gained along several years of working on robotic projects can be share with the scientific community. By doing so, not only better research projects can be conducted, but specially common or subtle failures can be avoided. In addition, we plan to open a special session or discussion panel where people participating on shared tasks or competitions like the DARPA Robotics Challenge7, can explaining their experiences and problems encountered.
We want to thank to all the members of the program committee who helped during the review process and during the organization of the workshop. The full list of contributors and program committee members can be found at the workshop website8.