Envisioning an Infrastructure for Multi-Robot and Collaborative Autonomy Testing and Evaluation
Recent years have seen significant progress made in standardizing robot software, thanks to ROS and its associated simulation tools such as Gazebo. This has enabled researchers to build on each other’s work without having to reinvent the wheel. Nevertheless, there is a critical lack of infrastructure when it comes to multi-robot systems and collaborative autonomy. The key question that we would like to discuss at this workshop is: what should the testing and validation infrastructure for multi-robot and collaborative autonomy look like.
Researchers who are inventing and enhancing new collaboration algorithms sometimes resort to testing their innovations on a small set of simplified scenarios that they have used in their previous work in order to reduce the time and cost of testing. Such testing may be merely a demonstration that the collaboration algorithm works; it may not yield comparisons with existing algorithms that generate insights into the performance and cost tradeoffs; and it may not consider a broad enough set of missions and scenarios needed for test and evaluation, validation and verification (TEVV). The multi-robot systems community needs an infrastructure that supports system development and testing from concept to realization in multiple domains. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners to understand the infrastructure needs of collaborative autonomy testing.
The University of Maryland recently received a planning grant from the CISE Community Research Infrastructure (CCRI) program to envision what an Infrastructure for Collaborative Autonomy Testing (ICAT) would look like. Through this workshop, we seek to foster a discussion with the broader community, understand the needs of the stakeholders, and identify effective resources that might be incorporated into ICAT. Through this workshop, a larger portion of the CISE MRS research community will be able to participate in the design of ICAT.
University of Virginia
University of Bristol
TU Berlin
Army Research Lab
Cambridge University
Open Robotics
We invite participants to submit their research in RSS format (up to 4 pages including figures, excluding references). We encourage the submission of early ideas, late-breaking results, position papers, or open research questions that are likely to generate interesting discussions. Accepted papers will be presented in a poster session and selected papers as spotlight talks. All submitted contributions will go through a single blind review process.
The specific goals of the workshop will be to discuss ideas around following topics:
Please email submissions (in PDF format) to: rss22eimrcate@gmail.com
RSS Submission Template: https://roboticsconference.org/information/authorinfo/
For more information, see https://raaslab.org/rss2022/
