What is the motivation for this workshop?

The recent advancements in autonomy algorithms and computational hardware have enabled robots to break out of contrived laboratory settings and be deployed in the real world. There is a growing demand for modern civilian and military systems to not only exhibit complex and intelligent behavior in response to external stimuli, but to augment capabilities through machine learning techniques. In order for complex robotic systems to demonstrate intelligent and consistent performance across diverse scenarios that they encounter, it's imperative that a number of distinct, yet interrelated modules (i.e. estimation, decision making, learning, control) are tightly integrated. Today, these individual topics are being widely researched upon in isolation. Hence, this workshop aims to bring together researchers from different communities and discuss problems that occur at the intersection of their fields, present recent advances and contemplate on future directions of research.

What are some conrete outcomes from this worksop?

While the workshop will feature a wide range of talks and panel discussions, we are striving to have a more concrete outcome from the workshop. We aim to have participants collaboratively generate a roadmap of the key technological challenges that we need to address for developing complex robotic systems. We will provide a skeleton to which participants can add technologies / areas / enablers in a temporal manner with interconnections and dependencies. This will help determine areas of collaboration that can provide synergy towards addressing the challenges. Details of the roadmap will be available soon.