On-line decision making is an important part of robotic problems where mobile robots operate in unknown or partially known dynamic environments in order to acquire information about some studied phenomena. This problem can be found in the robotic problems like autonomous data collection, environment monitoring, and robotic exploration missions that can be generally considered as variants of robotic information gathering. The key aspect of these problems is that the overall mission performance can be evaluated after the mission is completed and efficient decision-making depends on local in-situ decisions made according to the information acquired during the mission.
The main goal of the workshop is to discuss and share ideas and approaches related to the on-line (in-situ) decision-making to coordinate a team of mobile robots to fulfil a global mission objective by individual actions performed by particular team members. The particular focus of the workshop are missions like multi-robot exploration, persistent environment monitoring, surveillance and reconnaissance tasks. The fundamental challenge of these missions is that little or no information about the environment is known in advance. Therefore, one of the problems needed to be addressed is how to trade-off exploration of the unknown parts of the environment to collect new information about the operational environment and exploitation of the current knowledge acquired so far to improve the mission performance.
Topics
The workshop aims to develop discussion about the current niche, and therefore, unpublished work and also already published materials could be accepted for the presentation. The received contributions will be evaluated in the peer-reviewed process, where the main evaluation criterion will be the relevance of the contribution to the workshop topics. The workshop will be full day event with oral presentations of the peer-reviewed refereed papers. Contributed presentations are solicited in the following topics addressing the scientific challenges in related to on-line decision-making and multi-robot coordination:
- Distributed algorithms and decentralized approaches for multi-robot coordination
- Robustness of on-line decision-making policies
- Communication complexity in multi-robot systems
- Theoretical foundations for multi-agent on-line decision making with a limited prior knowledge about the problem domain
- Exploration, surveillance, inspection missions in unknown or dynamic environments
- Multi-Robot informative path planning
- Cooperative persistent environment monitoring
- Bio-inspired and novel computational decision-making approaches
- Benchmarks, performance metrics, and experimenting methodology for in-situ decision-making strategies
Notice, the workshop topics are not limited to multi-robot missions only, also single robot approaches that deal with foundations for on-line decision-making and that can be extended in some way to multi-robot systems are of a high relevance to the workshop and authors are highly encouraged to submit papers with the related topic.
All accepted contributions will be given an oral presentation. Selected papers will be published in the Acta Polytechnica journal indexed by SCOPUS. All the papers and presentation slides will be made publicly available whenever possible.
Important Dates
| Workshop Paper Submission: | |
| Notification of Acceptance: | |
| Camera Ready Deadline: | August 31, 2015 |
| Workshop: | October 2, 2015 |
Submission
The workshop aims to develop discussion about the current niche, and therefore, unpublished work and also already published materials could be accepted for the presentation. The received contributions will be evaluated in the peer-reviewed process, where the main evaluation criterion will be the relevance of the contribution to the workshop topics. All accepted contributions will be given an oral presentation and will be made publicly available whenever possible.
Submissions must be made electronically as a single Portable Document Format (PDF) file via the workshop submission site at https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=demur15. Accepted submissions will be publicly available if possible. Submitted papers may not exceed 8 pages using Acta Polytechnica format.