Conferences
4 September 2020, Santiago de Compostela, Spain
First Workshop on Agents and Robots for reliable Engineered Autonomy (AREA)
Autonomous agents is a well-established area that has been researched for decades, both from a design and implementation viewpoint. Nonetheless, the application of agents in real world scenarios is largely adopted when logical distribution is needed, while still limited when physical distribution is necessary. In parallel, robots are no longer used only in industrial applications, but are instead being applied to an increasing number of domains, ranging from robotic assistants to search and rescue. Robots in these applications often benefit from (or require) some level (semi or full) of autonomy. Thus, multi-agent solutions can be exploited in robotic scenarios, considering their strong similarity both in terms of logical distribution and interaction among autonomous entities.
The autonomous behaviour responsible for decision-making should (ideally) be verifiable since these systems are expensive to produce and are often deployed in safety-critical situations. Thus, verification and validation are important and necessary steps towards providing assurances about the reliability of autonomy in these systems. This workshop aims to bring together researchers from the autonomous agents, software engineering and the robotics communities, as combining knowledge coming from these two research areas may lead to innovative approaches that solve complex problems related with the verification and validation of autonomous robotic systems. Consequently, we encourage submissions that combine agents, robots, and verification, but we also welcome papers focused on one of these areas, as long as their applicability to the other areas is clear.
List of Topics
- Agent-based modular architectures applicable to robots
- Agent oriented software engineering to model high-level control in robotic development
- Agent programming languages and tools for developing robotic or intelligent autonomous systems
- Coordination, interaction, and negotiation protocols for agents and robots
- Distributed problem solving and automated planning in autonomous systems
- Fault tolerance, health-management, and long-term autonomy
- Real world applications of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems in robotics
- Real-time multi-agent systems
- Reliable software engineering of autonomy
- Runtime verification of autonomous agents and robotic systems
- Task and resource allocation in multi-robot systems
- Verification and validation of autonomous systems
- Testing and simulation tools and techniques for autonomous or robotic systems
- Self healing entities and systems
