Workshop Objectives: The growing need for climate adaptation, mitigation, and carbon emission reduction presents an opportunity for robotics and automation technology to be employed in commercial marine applications such as offshore wind and aquaculture. This workshop will bring together ocean science experts and roboticists across academia, government, and industry to learn about challenges faced by Blue Economy stakeholders and to identify new opportunities for robotics and automation technologies, which includes industry segments like aquaculture and fisheries, oil and gas, offshore wind, shipping and transportation, and tourism. The workshop will enable participants to learn about the recent interdisciplinary advances in relevant ocean, robotics, and automation sciences and the Blue Economy commercial and industrial activities. The goal is to establish new synergies between these groups that can accelerate the development of new robotics and autonomous technologies in marine application domains. We plan to identify and discuss technology bottlenecks related to deployment of marine robots in challenging environments, such as icy oceans, deep oceans, coastal environments, air-sea interfaces, large water bodies, and complex urban-aquatic settings. The vision is to create a community where scientists, roboticists, and industry experts can engage and collaborate in developing the next generation of intelligent sensing, mitigation, assistive technologies for climate related applications such as atmospheric and ocean modeling, extreme weather forecast and prediction, search and rescue after extreme weather events, disaster recovery, infrastructure monitoring and maintenance, sustainable off-shore energy, aquaculture, etc.
State-of-the-art content to benefit attendees: We have invited leading experts in oceanography, aquaculture, robotics and automation to discuss state-of-the-art technologies, gaps in our scientific understanding, and opportunities for new technological contributions. Similarly, we have invited practitioners in industry and government to present and discuss commercial and application needs, technological divides that must be bridged, and opportunities for technology transfer. In addition, the workshop agenda includes opportunities for researchers and graduate students to present their latest works and industrial/commercial participants to present their work, mission objectives, and recruit students in the form of two poster sessions. Lastly, the workshop will conclude with a panel discussion on the grand challenges and new opportunities.
Our academic speakers consist of experts ranging from marine roboticists, oceanographers, and aquaculture specialists. Our industry speakers stem from a wide range of big and small Blue Economy companies. The diverse opinions and solutions of these speakers will bring unique perspectives on problems with significant societal and economic impact.
Attendee engagement and idea exchange: We plan to encourage interaction between participants by structuring sessions for young researchers to receive feedback from senior researchers, deliberate scheduling of high attendance events before and after breaks, and carefully designing activities to encourage cross-disciplinary collaboration, e.g., industry networking sessions.
Diversity of content at IROS 2023: Often workshops focus on either marine robotics, climate change, or other specialized topics and do not explicitly bring the viewpoints of industry and government stakeholders into the discussion of robotics science and technology development. However, it is essential to include as many perspectives and stakeholders as possible in conversations addressing grand societal challenges such as climate resiliency and global economic opportunities, like the sustainable exploitation of our coasts and oceans. To help combat climate change roboticists will need to work together with ocean scientists and Blue Economy industrial partners and practitioners to ensure that solutions meet current needs. This workshop aims to bring all three parties together to identify existing scientific and technological gaps and explore new opportunities for collaboration.
To capture the vast breadth of physical phenomena and engineering requirements, efforts addressing Blue Economy and climate resiliency challenges will have to be interdisciplinary; drawing from physical sciences (e.g., physics and bio-geo-chemistry) to engineering disciplines (e.g., artificial intelligence, computer vision, and control). We must move away from approaches produced in an “application vacuum” and toward targeted system-environment synergistic designs produced in the context of, and in service to the observational objective at hand. By bringing together ocean scientists, roboticists, and Blue Economy practitioners and stakeholders, we can attract and integrate a wide range of perspectives and opinions into our collective approach to address Blue Economy and climate resiliency challenges through robotics technology.