2nd (Virtual) Workshop on

Robust autonomy:

Safe robot learning and control in uncertain real-world environments

Robotics: Science and Systems 2020

Update regarding COVID-19

Due to the pandemic, our workshop will take place virtually during the original date, July 13th. Please register for RSS to gain access to the virtual links for this workshop.

Overview

When autonomous systems such as self-driving cars and robotic manipulators are deployed in real-world environments, it is of the utmost importance to consider---and ideally to guarantee---safe runtime operation. Since these systems often operate in highly uncertain and dynamic environments, it is crucial for them to model and quantify environmental uncertainty, understand its impact on system dynamics, predict the motion of other agents, and make safe, risk-aware decisions. Safety and robustness have been studied extensively from a theoretical perspective, and there are several prominent success stories in application, e.g. in aviation. However, techniques with strong theoretical safety properties have yet to penetrate many new and exciting robotic application areas, such as autonomous driving, in which uncertainty in environmental perception and prediction overwhelm traditional safety analysis.

Topics and Objectives

This workshop aims to:

raise open questions on safety issues when robots operate autonomously in uncertain, real-world environments
discuss meaningful theoretical relaxations of strict safety guarantees which could be more easily used in practice
encourage conversation between perception and control communities on handling uncertainty from the sensors, down to actuation, and
provide a forum for discussion among researchers, industry, and regulators as to the core challenges, promising solution strategies, fundamental limitations, and regulatory realities involved in deploying safety-critical systems

Areas of interest:

Modeling uncertainty, safe motion planning, collision avoidance, decision-making in dynamic environments, intent prediction, safe exploration, safety and risk analysis, etc.

Techniques include:

Optimal control, Robust control, Probability theory, Bayesian inference, POMDPs, etc.

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Last year's webpage: https://sites.google.com/view/rss19safe/home

Date and Location

Monday, July 13, 2020 (WS2-2)

(Note: All RSS workshops will be held virtually. Information to be announced.)

Invited Speakers

Aaron Ames (Caltech)

Bipedal robotics, hybrid systems, nonlinear control

Ram Vasudevan (U of Michigan)

Data-driven optimization, systems theory, human and robot interaction

Thomas Dietterich (Oregon State)

Robust artificial intelligence, machine learning, reinforcement learning

Tim Barfoot (U of Toronto)

Visual navigation, control, planning for mobile robots

Katie Driggs-Campbell (UIUC)

Robotics, autonomous vehicles, human-robot interaction, machine learning

Call for Papers -- Submissions

Submission website:

https://openreview.net/group?id=roboticsfoundation.org/RSS/2020/Workshop/Robust_Autonomy

The workshop welcomes short papers (maximum 2 pages, excluding references) with theory, applications, or attempts to improve efficiency in existing modeling techniques as well as novel techniques. Please format submissions in RSS paper format using anonymous double blind submission standards (more information and a template can be acquired at http://www.roboticsconference.org/information/authorinfo/).

Submissions will be double blind to the general public and to the reviewers. Every submission will be reviewed by two members of the program committee according to the usual criteria such as relevance to the workshop, significance of the contribution, and technical quality. Submissions sent to other conferences are allowed. It is the responsibility of the authors to ensure that those venues allow for papers submitted to be already published in "informal" ways (e.g. on proceedings or websites without associated ISSN/ISBN).

The workshop is meant to be an open and inclusive forum, and we encourage papers that report on work in progress or that do not fit the mold of a typical conference paper. Non-trivial negative results are especially welcome to the workshop, but we expect the authors to argue for the significance of the presented results to alternative lines of research on the topic of choice.

Accepted papers will be available online on OpenReview and presented as contributed talks and/or posters. At least one author of each accepted paper must attend the workshop in order to present their work.