We are happy to announce the half-day workshop "Reliable AI for Marine Robotics: Challenges and Opportunities" at the conference IROS 2021. It will be an online event on October 1st, from 16:10 to 18:10 CET.

Closer to the event, we will disclose the link to the virtual room, where the workshop will be held.


Come to join us!

What to Expect from this Workshop?

The underwater industry is an important part of several countries in the world, including wind energy, oil and gas, food, pharma, mining, and bio- and geo- science. Responsible and environmentally-friendly growth of economies calls for automation of monitoring to prevent unexpected energy blackouts, oil and gas spills, and pollution from food, pharma, and mining. This in turn requires the development of reliable artificial intelligence (AI) for underwater robotics.


We believe there is a gap between what the underwater robotics industry delivers today and the required levels of reliability and autonomy. Two interrelated reasons for this gap are the lack of reliable AI methods for submarine operations and the lack of AI-ready reliability assessment methods for risks. This gap creates career opportunities for a new generation of experts who understand both the challenges of underwater robotics and development methods for safe and reliable autonomy.

This workshop will bring together recognized robotics AI, software reliability, and safety experts. More specifically, this workshop will focus on underwater robotics AI methods with quantified reliability, correctness specs, models, tests, and analysis & verification methods.

The experts both from academia and industry will discuss some basic questions; such as:

  • Can we rely on AI-controlled underwater robots?

  • What are the requirements for future applications of underwater robotics and the development methods for safe and reliable autonomy?

  • What happens in the brain of AI-based robots operating underwater?


The experts in the workshop will focus on various interdisciplinary research activities in:

(i) computer vision and machine learning;

(ii) knowledge, reasoning, and planning;

(iii) testing, model-driven-engineering, bug finding;

(iv) verification and model-checking.

The ultimate goal of this workshop is to understand both the challenges of underwater robotics and the development methods for safe and reliable autonomy. Since both AI and underwater robotics have increasing interest, we believe this workshop will attract attention both from academia and industry and help researchers to consider the reliable autonomy for underwater robotics holistically.

We are going to have a combination of expert talks, students’ poster presentations, finishing with a round table discussion. Researchers from various backgrounds (robotics, computer vision, software engineering, etc.) will prioritize different problems in underwater robotics. Meanwhile, marine industry will bring their real-time problems for discussions. In the end, we will have a mix of academia/industry group who will be discussing both the challenges and opportunities in the marine industry.

Keep an eye on our site, we will soon release the program with the speakers' names and profiles!

Paper Submission

Do you want to present your research project in this workshop?


We accept contributions in the following form:

  • Papers, no more than 2 pages long;

  • All papers must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference.

You can find the submission link here!

And if you got interested, visit the Paper Submission tab for more information, and start preparing your paper!

Confirmed Speakers

Speakers from Academia

Speakers from Industry

Prof. Erika Abraham (RWTH)

Prof. Michael Beetz (University of Bremen)

Dr. Leif Christensen (DFKI)

Prof. Francesco Maurelli (Jacobs University Bremen)

Dr. Yury Brodskiy (EIVA)

Dr. Peter Kampmann (ROSEN)

Dr. Stephanie Kemna

Dr. Yulia Sandamirskaya (Intel)

Dr. Jakob Schwendner (Kraken Robotik)