Call for Papers: Workshop on Agents Meet Robots (http://www.engga.uwo.ca/cdsgroup/agentrobot), May 16th, 2004, in conjunction with the Seventeenth Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence AI'2004 (http://cs.uwindsor.ca/~ai04/ ), The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada
Background and Goals Agents and robots are usually attributed to different domains, software and hardware respectively. However, there is considerable common ground that exists between the two fields of research and there is significant gain that can be attained through joint research efforts. Agent-orientation is a new and rapidly growing design paradigm for the next generation and emerging intelligent distributed systems in open environments. It provides the next step in the evolution of computational modeling, programming methodologies and software engineering paradigms. The objective is to create agents that are autonomous entities capable of reactively and/or pro-actively influencing their dynamic environment. An important feature of agents is the ability to interact cooperatively or competitively with the entities of the environments including humans. Agents and multi-agent community has extensively studied theories and developed rich set of models and algorithms for interactions and coordination among cooperative and self-interest agents. This body of theories and algorithms can be very instrumental for designing and developing coordination and cooperative behavior for multi-robotic systems. Yet, multi-robotic systems community has produced innovative and ! large body of solutions in biological inspiration design, control architecture, motion coordination and learning. A special interest in multi-robotic systems is to develop robotic platforms that can work together in a coordinated fashion. Cooperative robots are constantly interacting not only with the dynamic environment, but also with each other and possibly with human partners. Certainly, the integration of this wealth of results driven by real-world scenarios will provide foundation and pragmatic insights for developing practical models and theories for the agent community. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers from these two fields in an effort to highlight the state-of-the-art and discuss the challenges and opportunities to explore those areas that can benefit from joint research efforts. Topics of Interest This workshop will be organized around challenging problems for both communities which will include but not limited to: " Multiagent Architectures for Robotic Systems " Autonomous and Cooperative Robots " Economic Agents for Cooperative Robots " Agent-Based Distributed Control of Robotic Systems " Motion Coordination " Communication Models for Robotic Systems " Human-Robot Interaction Mechanisms " Adaptive Agents and Reconfigurable Robotics Organizing committee Hamada Ghenniwa, University of Western Ontario Weiming Shen, National Research Council / University of Western Ontario Mohamed Kamel, University of Waterloo Workshop format, reviewing process In addition to regular workshop paper presentations, we plan to arrange one keynote presentation and one discussion panel. Each submitted full paper will be reviewed by at least two committee members. Format of the proceedings and Special Issue The Workshop Proceedings will be published by National Research Council Canada. Authors of selected workshop papers will be invited to extend their papers for possible publication in a special issue of the International Journal of Robotics and Automation by Acta Press (http://www.actapress.com/journals/journals.htm#Robotics). Submission of Papers Prospective authors are invited to submit papers in any of the topics listed above. Only full papers in English will be accepted, and the length of the paper should be limited to 5000 words. Instructions for preparing the manuscript can be found at http://www.actapress.com/journals/format.htm. Please send papers in electronic form to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Important Dates Full paper submission deadline: Jan. 31, 2004 Paper acceptance notification: Feb. 29, 2004 Final versions of accepted papers due: Mar. 31, 2004 Workshop Program Committee Hussein Abdullah, University of Guelph John Anderson, U of Manitoba Steven Beauchemin, University of Western Ontario Andy Hodge, University of Waterloo Michael Huhns, University of South Carolina William Gruver, Simon Fraser University Fakhreddine Karray, University of Waterloo Sherman Lang, National Research Council Kenneth McIsaac, University of Western Ontario Mehrdad Moallem, University of Western Ontario Rajni Patel, University of Western Ontario Jagath Samarabandu, University of Western Ontario Yang Xiang, University of Guelph Simon Yang, University of Guelph Hong Zhang, University of Alberta
