International Symposium on Robotics Heads Back to U.S.

March 3, 2011
Marking the 50th Anniversary of the First Industrial Robot Installation in the U.S., ISR Comes back to North America After Three Years in Europe and Asia

After runs in Korea, Spain and Germany, the annual robotics conference International Symposium on Robotics (ISR) will be held this year again in the U.S., as part of Automate 2011 at McCormick Place in Chicago, March 21-24.

“The ISR occupies a unique place in the history of robotics, and we’re delighted to be hosting it again in the U.S. for the first time since 2007,” says Jeff Burnstein, president of the Robotic Industries Association (RIA), a co-sponsor of the Automate 2011 event and the 42nd ISR.

ISR will feature speakers from the U.S., Canada, Denmark, France, Italy, U.K. and Taiwan, among other nations, Burnstein says. Topics will include new methods of fixturing for airplane and automotive assembly, advances in autonomous industrial mobile manipulators, real-time image processing of human face identification, and collision-free moving object tracking with active visual servoing.

“The ISR has a history of presenting cutting-edge research that is likely to be commercialized in the near term, and we expect this year to open up many eyes about what’s coming in robotics and related areas such as machine vision,” Burnstein says.

The ISR is sponsored by the International Federation of Robotics, and is held in a different country each year. The 2012 event will be held in Taiwan for the first time, and is not expected to return to the U.S. until at least 2015.

“As 2011 marks the 50th anniversary of the installation of the first industrial robot in the United States it is great that the U.S. is hosting the ISR this year,” Burnstein notes. “We will have a special pavilion on the show floor to highlight the 50th anniversary of robotics technology.”