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DLI 2025 - Robot Learning for Africa Workshop Organizing Committee
Robot Learning for Africa Workshop
I am part of the organizing committee for the Robot Learning for Africa workshop at the Deep Learning Indaba 2025 in Rwanda. This workshop focuses on the intersection of modern machine learning techniques and robotics hardware, specifically tailored to the African context. The workshop was a component of the Deep Learning Indaba 2025.
Workshop Goals
- Accessibility: Lowering the barrier to entry for robotics research by providing access to affordable hardware (e.g., Pepper, low-cost manipulators).
- Education: Providing hands-on tutorials on reinforcement learning, computer vision, and sim-to-real transfer.
- Collaboration: Building a network of African robot learning researchers.
The focus of this workshop was on human pose estimation and how these types of algorithms can improve robots’ social interactions. By enabling the robot to accurately interpret human body language, we aim to create more natural and effective human-robot interactions in educational and service settings. I assisted with implementing the pose estimation algorithm onto a Pepper robot and overlaying it with Pepper’s camera stream, so that the audience could see Pepper’s perspective in real time.
