NSF-Sponsored Workshop:

Robot Planning in the Real World: Research Challenges and Opportunities

Workshop Overview

In the last decade, researchers have made significant progress on robot planning, leading to impressive real-time planners for such challenging tasks as driving, flying, walking, and manipulating objects. Yet, robots are deployed in only a small number of niche areas, and most deployed robots have very minimal planning capability.

The aim of the workshop is to bring together people from academia, industry, and government research agencies to discuss how the field of robot planning should progress to make robots less reliant on human supervision and more widely deployable in the real world. The workshop brings together people with expertise in robotics, artificial intelligence, and related research disciplines to discuss the state of the art in planning, its use in various robotic applications, and current research challenges. By studying planning research across different applications, analyzing planning challenges as part of complete robot architectures, and discussing the interaction of planning with other robot modules (such as perception, control, and user interfaces), the workshop participants will gain new insights into how planning can help robots become more robust and efficient. The workshop consists of invited talks, breakout sessions, panels, and a final discussion to create a roadmap for the field of robot planning that will be summarized in a report. The workshop and the resulting report will have the potential to stimulate future research on robot planning across many applications, from personal assistance to medicine to exploration to manufacturing.

Date: October 28-29, 2013
Location: Holiday Inn Arlington at Ballston, Arlington, VA
Room: Junior Ballroom

Workshop Organizers

Ron Alterovitz
Department of Computer Science
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Sven Koenig
Department of Computer Science
University of Southern California

Maxim Likhachev
Robotics Institute
Carnegie Mellon University

The organizers thank S.K. Gupta from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for his support of this workshop.


NSF logo This workshop is made possible by generous support from the National Science Foundation under award #1349355. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed on this web site do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.