International Workshop on Ontologies for Autonomous Robotics (ROBONTICS 2020) @ FOIS 2020->2021, part of Bolzano Summer of Knowledge (BOSK 2021), Bolzano, Italy

COVID-19 related update

We encourage researchers interested in the fields of robotics and knowledge engineering to submit research and position papers by Aug 7; accepted papers will be published in a JOWO proceedings volume in 2020.

Researchers with accepted papers will be invited to present at the RobOntics 2021 workshop.

WORKSHOP MOTIVATION

ROBONTICS focuses on the area of robot autonomy enabled by knowledge-driven approaches, and in particular formal ontologies. It aims to foster interaction across robotics, ontology, and knowledge representation and reasoning, to match open problems to promising approaches, and to review progress in knowledge-driven robotics.

Today ontologies are used in robotics and standardization efforts for robotics knowledge management. Many open problems involve autonomous robotic agents operating in natural or human environments, and several research projects in healthcare assistance, logistics, autonomous driving, etc, aim to bring robots into realistic human environments.

One of the difficulties is the large amount of real-world knowledge that an agent needs to have to be able to act competently and autonomously. Further, any item of knowledge is often relevant for many agents and behaviors, and as such should be reusable. To garner trust and enable debugging, knowledge should also be accessible to human operators, both in terms of explaining what knowledge is present in a system, and of providing ways to easily amend it if necessary.

IMPORTANT DATES

  • Submission deadline: August 7, 2020
  • Notification: August 25, 2020
  • Camera ready: September 2, 2020
  • Workshop: to be announced, 2021

LIST OF TOPICS (partial)

Participants are invited to submit original short papers (from 4 to 6 pages + references) for oral presentation, including, but not limited to, topics such as:

  • Foundational issues:
    • are there some ontological approaches better suited than others for autonomous robotics? why?
    • how should we ontologically model notions like capability, action, interaction, context etc. in robotics?
  • Robustness:
    • how can ontologies be used to help robots cope with the variety and relatively fluid structure of human environments?
  • Ontologies in the perception-action loop:
    • what roles can ontology play in autonomous manipulation?
    • how can we help robots autonomously cope with manipulation problems using ontology?
    • how can ontology be used to support machine learning for object classification?
  • Interactivity:
    • how can knowledge about other agents present in the environment be modelled?
    • how should we ontologically model the flow of an interaction, such as a conversation or shared task?
  • Normed behavior:
    • how should we ontologically represent, and then have a robot act according to, norms on behavior such as cultural expectations?
    • how can these expectations be acquired, and would they be the same for robots as they are for humans?
  • Explainability:
    • decision chains are very complex; how can these be organized and presented at various levels of detail for the benefit of a human user?
    • what, ontologically, is an explanation? what is a good explanation, and how can one be generated from a collection of knowledge items?

WORKSHOP CO-CHAIRS (alphabetical order)

  • Daniel Beßler, Institute for Artificial Intelligence, University of Bremen, Germany
  • Stefano Borgo, Laboratory for Applied Ontology (LOA), ISTC CNR, Trento, Italy
  • Mohammed Diab, Institute of Industrial and Control Engineering, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain
  • Aldo Gangemi, University of Bologna and ISTC-CNR, Italy
  • Alberto Olivares-Alarcos, Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial (CSIC-UPC), Barcelona, Spain
  • Mihai Pomarlan, Faculty of Linguistics and Literature, University of Bremen, Germany
  • Robert Porzel, Digital Media Lab, University of Bremen, Germany

SUBMISSION INFORMATION

Papers presenting initial or ongoing research are welcome; so are position and survey papers delineating robotics problems and/or discussing the suitability of knowlege engineering approaches to solve such problems.

All the contributions to the workshop must be submitted according to the IOS press format available from https://www.iospress.nl/service/authors/latex-and-word-tools-for-book-authors/. Submitted papers must not exceed 6 pages (not including references).

Papers will be refereed and accepted on the basis of their merit, originality, and relevance to the workshop. Each paper will be reviewed by at least two Program Committee members.

Papers must be submitted electronically in PDF, using this link:

PUBLICATION

Accepted contributions to the workshop will be published in an open access CEUR volume as part of the new IAOA series (see http://ceur-ws.org/iaoa.html).

(Banner image is provided by Françoise Foliot to wikimedia commons under the CC-BY-SA 4.0 license.)