IROS 2020 - Workshop

Summary

Achieving long-term autonomy by mobile robots means the ability to operate autonomously under no/or minimal supervision for days, weeks, months or even years. During these long periods, the environment where the robot operates can experience unpredictable gradual or/and radical changes. This fact adds an extra dimension to the fundamental problems in robotics such as perception, planning, navigation, SLAM and manipulation; and makes them more challenging.

One of the keys to achieving long-term autonomy is having reliable sub-components in the robotic operating system, including the machine learning-based onse. In this context, reliability means that the components can identify and recover from failures and prevent or reduce the likelihood of failures in general, which otherwise can terminate the mission of the robot or/and might cause severe danger.

This workshop focuses on the problem of long-term autonomy for mobile robots and the challenge of building a reliabile machine learning components in the robotic system that can handle bad sensory data, shifts to abnormal operational conditions, misclassification and detections.

We invite several renowned experts in the field who will highlight the main challenges these robots face and talk about their own experiences and the lessons they learnt during long-term deployments of their robots.