ICRA 2023 Full-day Workshop
Communication Challenges in Multi-Robot Systems: Perception, Coordination, and Learning
2 June 2023
at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2023, London, UK
We extended the deadline to submit contributions by a week. New Deadline: April 12, 2023 (AoE Time)
Workshop Overview
Wireless networking is crucial in achieving efficient missions with mobile robots and multi-robot systems. Robots use communication to facilitate data sharing, coordination, and cooperation with other robots and human users. However, real-world communication is often unreliable, expensive, non-ideal, and/or otherwise challenging in a variety of ways, as evident by the recent post-disaster deployments of robotic and multi-robot solutions. These challenges have even more significance and ramifications when it comes to multi-robot systems, where communication is key to achieving successful coordination, joint perception, and cooperative planning. In fact, many robotic challenges, including the DARPA robotics and subT challenges, often involve variations of such communication challenges in their objectives. This workshop will offer an excellent and timely venue to discuss these challenges along with their solutions. The workshop will gather an excellent lineup of invited talks from academia, government, and industry who are leading experts, as well as budding and early-career researchers from different research domains (e.g., mobile networking, field robotics, multi-robot systems).
The workshop will engage the researchers at the intersection of disciplines in an effort to obtain a unification of the required solutions to address these challenges in an effective and informed manner.
We have an exciting workshop program with invited speakers from both academia and industry.
The program includes a panel discussion where contributors and audience can use this opportunity to discuss the active and open problems and help guide the future needs of this area of research that are complementary to both MRS and the Wireless Networking community.
The workshop is supported by the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Multi-Robot Systems
Topics of Interest
The workshop aims at the research directions and developments in realizing communication-aware and communication-enabling solutions for multi-robot tasks and applications. They are expected to have well-defined assumptions, constraints, or experimental observations that reflect the real-world communication challenges and multi-robot applications, but may come from any sub-field of robotics and be motivated by any robotic problem.
Example topics may include, but are not limited to, the following list of topics:
- Communication-aware robotics and multi-robot algorithms
- Multi-robot perception methods working in degraded communication environments
- Multi-robot coordination and control algorithms under restricted communication settings
- Graceful performance declines vs. decreasing quality of multi-robot systems under limited communication
- Robotic and multi-robot systems that adapt to communication constraints
- Wireless networking algorithms that adapt to robotic requirements
- Machine learning tools to address multi-robot communication challenges
- Robotic hardware and software designs to overcome communication issues common in robotics
- Modeling and evaluation of real-world communication constraints in the context of multi-robot applications
The timeliness of this workshop is granted by our aspirations to solve increasingly complex problems that require the distribution of distinct capabilities among multi-robot teams. During the process of developing such solutions, heterogeneity and diversity become design features. However, we still lack the necessary analytical tools that help us understand the implications. By building on foundational concepts of network science, security, and robustness, we should aim to develop formal definitions of resilience that can be applied to networked multi-robot systems. The workshop's scope of topics will explore the various dimensions along which heterogeneity and diversity occur: behavioral, functional, morphological, temporal, and spatial.
Call For Contributions (Posters/Oral Presentations):
We invite two types of contributions that are either ongoing work-in-progress or matured research on the above topics related to Communication-Aware Multi-Robot Systems
- Short Papers (2-4 Pages at Submission for Poster Presentation)
- Long Papers (4-6 Pages at Submission for Oral Presentation w/ option to present poster as well)
There will be a Best Poster Award.
The papers and the presentations will be made available on the workshop website. Note this is not an archival proceeding. We plan to organize a special issue on this theme in one of the reputed journals in Robotics, such as AURO, IJRR, T-RO, where we will invite the best contributors to submit their extended versions of the work.
Important Dates
Submission of Contributions (Extended Deadline): April 5, 2023 April 12, 2023 (AoE Time)
Notification to Authors: April 25, 2023 May 1, 2023
Workshop at ICRA 2023: June 2, 2023 (Full Day, London, UK)
Submit your paper at CMT: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/ICRACAMRS2023/
Organizing Committee
Dr. Ramviyas Parasuraman
Assistant Professor
University of Georgia
Dr. Michael Otte
Assistant Professor
University of Maryland
Dr. Karthik Dantu
Associate Professor
University at Buffalo
Dr. Geoffrey Hollinger
Associate Professor
Oregon Staten University
Dr. Robert Fitch
Professor
University of Technology Sydney
Donald Sofge
Section Head
U.S. Naval Research Laboratory
This workshop is part of and co-located with the
International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2023
ICRA 2023, London, UK
Venue: ExCeL London
Royal Victoria Dock
1 Western Gateway, London E16 1XL
29 May - 2 June 2023 (ICRA 2023)
2 June 2023 (This Workshop)
The largest and most prestigious event of the year in the Robotics and Automation calendar, 2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) will bring together the world's top academics, researchers, and industry representatives.
Taking place for the first time in the UK, London will provide the perfect backdrop to this world-class event. If Robotics and Automation is your field, you need to be a part of this.
Send questions related to workshop to ramviyas at uga dot edu