IMPORTANT DATES:
- Abstract submission deadline: April 14, 2013
- Notification of acceptance: April 21st, 2013
- Conference and Workshop Registration: Now Open (please, see:http://www.icra2013.org/)
GENERAL SCOPE:
Advances in embedded processor and sensor technology in the last thirty years have accelerated interest in many robot systems and distributed sensor networks for applications such as exploration and mapping of unknown environments, large scale environmental monitoring and surveillance, and search and rescue. The advances that have made individual robots more practical have enabled the research and development of teams of robots, where capabilities are expressed by the team rather than by a super-capable individual. This is especially relevant in complex tasks or missions where it is difficult to provide robots with specific instructions a priori due to incomplete knowledge of the environment or where mission criteria require capabilities that are varied in both quantity and difficulty, such as interplanetary exploration and search and rescue operations.
Despite the many worldwide R&D efforts focused on many robot systems, there are few examples of successful full-scale deployments of these systems in real-world application environments. The goal of this workshop is to bring together leading experts in many-robot systems from academia, government research labs, and industry to “cross the reality gap”. The objectives are to identify and discuss solutions towards moving many-robot systems out of the research laboratories and into the real world.
This half-day workshop will bring together experts in many-robot systems (including multi-robot teams, swarms, mobile sensor and communication networks, other networked mobile robots) to investigate the gap between theory (including research prototyping and demonstrations) and real world applications of many-robot systems. We will seek to identify “killer apps” along with key technical issues hampering the deployment of many robot systems, and discuss solutions towards moving these systems out of the laboratories and into real-world application environments. We refer to this process as "Crossing the Reality Gap".
This is the second “Crossing the Reality Gap” workshop held at ICRA. The first workshop held at ICRA 2012 and was organized by the same organizers. For ICRA 2013, we have included significant industry participation to help balance the various perspectives and further the discussions.
LIST OF TOPICS:
Architectures for many-robot systems
Biology and nature-inspired solutions
Collective decision-making
Communication reliability
Distributed multi-agent control
Field applications
Heterogeneous vs. homogeneous platforms
Human/robot interactions
Information sharing and cooperative sensing
Mobile sensor swarms
Planning with physical (e.g. communication or mobility) constraints
Robot-network interface
Robustness and reliability in planning and control
Robustness to hardware/system failure
Robust distributed navigation
Scalability
Situational awareness
Stability in unknown/uncertain environments
SUBMISSION:
Submissions for the interactive session must be made in the PDF format and follow the standard ICRA style for the layout (https://ras.papercept.net/conferences/scripts/start.pl). Abstracts are limited to one (1) letter size paper. Papers should be sent to manyrobotsystems@googlegroups.com by April 14, 2013. All contributions will be refereed.
REGISTRATION:
Please, refer to the conference web-page: http://www.icra2013.org/
ORGANIZERS:
Frank Ehlers, Bundeswehr Technical Centre for Ships and Naval Weapons, Germany
Lorenzo Sabattini, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italia
M. Ani Hsieh, Drexel University, USA
Volkan Isler, University of Minnesota, USA
Donald Sofge, Naval Research Laboratory, USA