Conferences

Autonomous agents are 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 has largely been adopted in applications which are primarily software based and remains limited in applications which involve physical interaction. In parallel, robots are no longer used only in tightly constrained industrial applications but are instead being applied in an increasing number of domains, ranging from robotic assistants to search and rescue, where the working environment is both dynamic and underspecified and may involve interactions between multiple robots and humans.

This presents significant challenges to traditional software engineering methodologies. Increased autonomy is an important route to enabling robotic applications to function in these environments, and autonomous agents and multiagent systems are a promising approach to their engineering. As autonomy and interaction increase, the engineering of reliable behavior becomes more challenging (both in robotic applications and in more traditional autonomous agent settings), and so, there is a need for research into new approaches to verification and validation that can be integrated in the engineering lifecycle of these systems.

This workshop aims to bring together researchers from the autonomous agents and the robotics communities, since combining knowledge from these two research areas may lead to innovative approaches that solve complex problems related to the verification and validation of autonomous robotic systems. Therefore, we encourage submissions that combine agents, robots, software engineering, and verification, but we also welcome papers focused on one of these areas, as long as their applicability to other areas is explicit.

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 multiagent systems in robotics
• Real-time multiagent systems
• Reliable software engineering of autonomy
• Runtime verification of autonomous agents and robotic systems
• Task and resource allocation in multirobot systems
• Verification and validation of autonomous systems
• Testing and simulation tools and techniques for autonomous or robotic systems
• Engineering reliable interactions between humans and autonomous robots or agents
• Verification and validation of human–robot interactions
• Engineering transparent decision making for autonomous systems

Kind regards, the organisers:

Rafael C. Cardoso, University of Aberdeen (UK)
Angelo Ferrando, University of Genova (Italy)
Fabio Papacchini, Lancaster University Leipzig (Germany)
Mehrnoosh Askarpour, McMaster University (Canada)
Louise A. Dennis, The University of Manchester (UK)

https://areaworkshop.github.io/AREA2022/