ICRA 2018 Workshop

From driverless cars to autonomous harvesters to service robots, mobile robots are leaving the factories and entering less structured, more complex and dynamic environments. The key competence of these robots is the ability of reliable operation for long periods of time under changing and unpredictable environmental conditions. In other words, these robots need to be persistent and demonstrate a high level of robustness and fault tolerance and recovery, and above all of that, they have to be able to adapt over time to the changes in their operational environment. However, development and testing of these competences is difficult and tedious, because it goes far beyond running proof-of-concept experiments in controlled environments for a limited period of time. This makes any experience with long-term deployment of autonomous systems a valuable knowledge. In this workshop, we invite a number of renowned experts in the field who will highlight the main challenges these robots face and talk about their own experiences and the lessons they learnt during long-term deployments of their robots. We also call for papers that address the long-term autonomy problem and in particular the topics below: