Multidisciplinary discussion, this is the key.
The workshop is open to any student, researcher, or company interested in exploiting robotic systems for real-world applications in natural environments. This objective includes tasks such as locomotion in challenging scenarios, energy efficiency, tasks (potentially) involving a high level of forceful interactions such as interactions with unknown and dynamic environments, and classification of natural species through artificial intelligence algorithms. Lessons learned from solving robotic environmental monitoring could also be beneficial for several different application domains such as agri-food, inspection and maintenance, and search and rescue, widening the audience interested in the topics of this workshop.
For these reasons, we believe that the considered topic could be of significant interest for a very broad audience. The main targeted communities are those related to mobile systems, e.g., legged robots, physical robot-environment interaction, and AI algorithms for plant classification and identification. However, people working on the design of intrinsically compliant systems, e.g., soft robots, may have interest in the proposed workshop to discuss ambitious alternative solutions to overcome these challenges. Finally, we expect that communities such as ecology and conservation biology can provide insights and inspiration to develop approaches to tackle the problem of robotic environmental monitoring.