Around mid May 2009, I discovered that in Sydney, just before my 60th birthday,
the 2009 Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation
(
ACRA09) would take place.
I decided to submit a paper. I intended to model the movements of a legged
caterpillar-like robot and present my preliminary results.
After three months, I had the paper ready for submission. You can read it
by clicking
here.
Two people reviewed the paper. The results were as follows:
|
Summary of reviews of pap103s1 |
| Rel | Sound | Imp | Orig |
Pres | Overall | Rec | Conf | Exp |
| Reviewer 1 | 9 | 7 | 8 | 7 |
6 | 8 | STRONG ACCEPT | 7 | Expert |
| Reviewer 2 | 5 | 4 | 5 | 3 |
5 | 4 | WEAK REJECT | 5 | Some background |
| Averages | 7.0 | 5.5 | 6.5 | 5.0 |
5.5 | 6.0 | 3.5 | 6.0 | 3.0 |
|
| Rel: |
Relevance [0-9] (higher is better) |
Sound: |
Technical Soundness [0-9] |
| Imp: |
Technical Importance [0-9] |
Orig: |
Originality [0-9] |
| Pres: |
Quality of Presentation [0-9] |
Overall: |
Overall rating [0-9] |
| Rec: |
Recommended action
[REJECT, WEAK REJECT, WEAK ACCEPT, ACCEPT, STRONG ACCEPT] |
| Conf: |
Level of confidence in your recommendation [0-9] |
| Exp: |
Level of your expertise in the relevant area
[No background, Some background, Knowledgeable, Expert] |
|
It was a split decision, with one reviewer strongly recommending the acceptance
and one weakly rejecting it. It is interesting to notice that one
reviewer systematically gave positive marks, while the other one was
consistently negative. I found it very surprising that the second reviewer
gave 3/10 points in originality, considering that only one paper on a
caterpillar-like robot is to be found in the literature, and it was written
in 2002...
Anyhow, the paper was rejected. The chairman of the reviewing committee
told me that they almost accepted it but, after a protracted discussion,
preferred other submissions. Well, it was a long shot, and I am indeed no
expert in robotics. Perhaps I was a bit (or a byte ;-) arrogant in thinking
that in a few months I could cook up a paper for a major conference...
The applet you see on the right of this text shows how a robot consisting of
a series of flexible segments would move. The caterpillar takes a step
every time you click on "Tick".
You can type a number in the input field and click on the "Set scale" button
to enlarge or shrink the caterpillar. The button "Set delta psi" lets you
change the rotation of the head segment when it takes a step. "Set f" sets
the fraction of step, whereby 1.0 means that the caterpillar head takes the
longest steps it can.
Click here to view the
the sources of the applet. I designed it in such a way that you can also run
it from a command line rather than within a browser. To do so, you need to
download the file crater.jar and execute the command:
java -jar crater.jar. Obviously, it will only work if you have
a Java runtime on your system and its folder is included in the path.
|
|
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