Releasing Robots into the Wild

This workshop aims to bring together the field robotics community to share experiences, challenges and solutions when it comes to taking robots out of the lab and into the real world. For robots to have a beneficial impact on society, they need to tested and deployed into real environments but this is probably the most challenging stage of the development process. Whether it’s flying drones over volcanoes, deploying them into nuclear environments or operating them in crowded shopping arcades, there are a multitude of challenges that need to be overcome. Many of these challenges however are often hidden. Whilst significant effort is put into the development of the technology in the research lab, it is very often the non-technical challenges which make real-world deployments so difficult.