Call for papers

[under construction]

Due to their increasing complexity, nowadays intervention robots, that to say those dedicated for instance to exploration, monitoring and supervision, security or defence applications, medical and human assistance definitely raise huge scientific and commercial issues. Whatever the considered environment, terrestrial, aerial, marine or even spatial, this complexity mainly derives from the integration of multiple functionalities: advanced perception, planning, navigation, autonomous behaviours, in parallel with communication or robots coordination enable to tackle more and more difficult missions.

But robots can only be equipped with such functions if an appropriate hardware and software structure is embedded: the architectures will hence be the main concern of this conference. As quoted above, the control architecture is thus a necessary element for the integration of a multitude of works; it also permits to cope with technological advances that continually offer new devices for sensing, communication, localization, computing, etc. As a matter of fact, it should be modular, reusable, scalable and even readable (ability to analyze and understand it). Besides, such properties ease the sharing of competencies among the robotics community, but also with computer scientists and automatics specialists as the domain is inherently a multidisciplinary one.

Numerous solutions have been proposed, based on the “classical” three layers architecture or on more “modern” approaches such as object or component oriented programming. Actually, almost every robot integrates its own architecture; the workshop will thus be a real opportunity to share ideas and experiments on these solutions but also on related needs, especially on middleware and code generation for robotics, which are of particular importance in multi-robot applications. Architecture design requires also realistic simulation environments to test and to evaluate different solutions. Validity concerns functional, reactive and non-functional (Real-Time, consumption …) aspects.

Hence, this conference on control architectures of robots aims at gathering a large number of robotics actors (researchers, manufacturers as well as state institutions) in order to highlight the multiple issues, key difficulties and potential sources of advances: architecture framework, process, validation and simulation.