Robotics is becoming a mainstream domain with a wide range of applications with both medium and long term impact on everyone’s lives. Current systems rely more and more on robot–robot communication and robot–human interaction. In terms of communication, a vocabulary with clear and concise definitions is a sine qua non component to enable information exchange among any group of agents, which can be human or non-human actors. This need for a well-defined knowledge representation is becoming evident if one considers the growing complexity of behaviors that robots are expected to perform as well as the rise of multi-robot and human–robot collaboration. This workshop aims to increase interest in ontology formalization and standardization for the Robotics and Automation (R&A) domain, as well as the ethical challenges involved with the interaction with humans.

The standard knowledge representation will: precisely define concepts and relations in the robot’s knowledge representation that includes, but not limited to, robot hardware and software, environment, cause and effects of performing actions, relationship between other robots and people; ensure common understanding among members of the community; facilitate efficient data integration and transfer of information among robotic systems.

Submission Guidelines

Participants are invited to submit:

• Papers: at least 6 pages. Papers with previous or on-going research, preliminary results, use cases. The aim is to disseminate to the community research works but also encourage fruitful discussions on open problems and novel ideas.
• Extended abstracts: 2-5 pages. Insights on new or ongoing projects on ontologies. The goal is to foster engaging technical and scientific discussions among ontology users and cultivate new collaborations. 

Workshop submissions must be in LNCS one-column format (1 page = 2500 characters). Please, check the CEUR publishing rules.

Papers and extended abstracts will be presented in person at ICRA in Yokohama via a poster to be displayed during the dedicated posters session.

List of Topics

Submissions shall include, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• Autonomous Robotics
• Ontology-based development for reasoning in Robotics and Automation
• Ontology-based Standards for reasoning in Robotics and Automation
• Knowledge representation and reasoning for robotics and automation using Ontologies
• Representation, reasoning, and behaviors for autonomy
• Robot-robot interaction and/or human-robot interaction
• Affordances in human-robot interaction
• Causation in human-robot interaction
• Human studies in human-robot interaction
• Building ethical AI and Robot systems
• Ethical design and development of AI and Robot systems
• Data privacy and protection within world of AI and Robots
• Trust and security for (autonomous) robotics
• Explainability in Robotics and Automation
• Ontology-based approaches for explainable agents and robots
• Fairness and Transparency in AI and Robots
• AI, Robotics and law
• Artificial intelligence and machine learning for autonomous robots
• Multiple autonomous robots and cloud robotics

Committees

Organizing committee

• Shelly Bagchi - U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, USA
• Paulo J.S. Gonçalves - IDMEC - Center of Intelligent Systems, University of Lisbon/ Instituto Politécnico de Castelo Branco, Portugal
• Daniel Beßler - Institute for Artificial Intelligence, University of Bremen, Germany
• Howard Li - University of New Brunswick, New Brunswick, Canada
• Alberto Olivares-Alarcos - Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial, CSIC-UPC, Spain
• Signe Redfield - Naval Research Lab, USA
• Elisa Tosello - Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento, Italy

Publication

All contributions (both papers and extended abstracts) will be peer-reviewed (single-blind) and published on the WORSA 2024 website with the permission of authors. Accepted papers will be published in the WOSRA series of CEUR-WS.

Venue

The conference will be held on May 13th @ ICRA 2024, Pacific Convention Plaza, Yokohama, Japan

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to alberto.olivares@upc.edu or etosello@fbk.eu