Motivation and Objectives
In the near future, it is expected that robotic systems will share the human living and working spaces: service robots and cybernetic transport systems are examples of two primary application areas. The technology is now mature; we have already witnessed autonomous mobile robots guiding people in museums and automated cars driving on the road network. While moving (especially at high speed), automated vehicles, mobile manipulators and humanoid robots can be potentially dangerous should a collision occur. Before letting such robotic systems transport or share space with people in a truly autonomous way, it is critical to assert and characterize their motion safety, i.e., their guaranteed ability to avoid collision.
Roboticists have long been aware of the motion safety issue; there is a rich literature on collision avoidance schemes. However, motion safety in the real world, especially for systems with interesting dynamics, remains an open problem. Demonstrating that a robotic system is working properly on a limited set of experiments is not enough. If autonomous robotic systems are ever to be deployed among human beings on a large scale, there is a need to characterize the level of motion safety that can be achieved and/or to specify the conditions under which it can be guaranteed.
The purpose of this workshop is to disseminate recent research advances in guaranteed motion safety for robotic systems operating in challenging situations, such as dynamic and uncertain environments and high-speed robotic systems. Overall, the focus of the workshop is on motion safety in dynamic environments; topics include, but are not limited to:
- Collision avoidance for mobile robots, manipulator arms or humanoids.
- Multi-robot / reciprocal collision avoidance.
- Multi-robot coordination, e.g. air or shipping traffic control.
- Safe reactive motion planning / dynamic replanning approaches.
- Safe motion for robotic systems with kinematic or dynamic constraints.
- Control theoretic approaches to motion safety.
- Deterministic and probabilistic approaches to motion safety.
- Deadlock and livelock avoidance in safe multi-robot coordination.
The workshop is a follow up to the workshop Guaranteeing Safe Navigation in Dynamic Environments that was successfully held during the 2010 Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). It focuses on papers based on sound theoretical frameworks that specifically address motion safety in a formal way.
Organization
- Thierry Fraichard, INRIA Grenoble Rhone-Alpes (FR).
- Kostas Bekris, University of Nevada, Reno (US).
- Jur van den Berg, University of North Carolina, Chapel-Hill (US).
