ICRA2021-AERIAL: ICRA 2021 Workshop on Resilient and Long-Term Autonomy for Aerial Robotic Systems |
Website | https://www.aerial-robotics-workshop.com/ |
Submission link | https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=icra2021aerial |
Submission deadline | April 21, 2021 |
Objectives
Recent years have seen tremendous progress in terms of design, navigation capabilities, manipulation, control, and autonomy of aerial robots. In these areas two major challenges that arise are the flight time and resilience: the ability of the system to provide some degree of redundancy, robustness and resourcefulness against undesired behaviors or external malicious events. While for large scale aerial systems, it is possible to design propulsion systems and multiple software/hardware mechanisms to ensure resilience, this is certainly challenging in the aerial robotics domain due to the small scale, size, and limited computation capabilities of these vehicles. On the energy side, lithium batteries are commonly used to power these systems and in most cases, limit the endurance to no more than 30 minutes. A possible solution for long-term autonomy has been to create recharging stations. However, these are cumbersome and do not have fast recharging capabilities. Another common approach is to fly at high speeds to accomplish as much as possible in the given time. Even this solution does not address the energy problem related to long-term autonomy operations. Similarly, in terms of resilient autonomy, many challenges remain, including, but not limited to, navigation in not only GPS-denied, but also visually-degraded environments, team operation, capacity for large-scale and long-term deployments where drifts and other sources of error accumulate and more. Long-term autonomy and resilience in aerial robotics have not been analyzed and discussed in a principled way yet. It is certainly difficult to have a taxonomy in this area since the problem can be approached in many different ways from mechanics, to multiple sensor systems, to enhanced computation and intelligent capabilities.
Website: https://www.aerial-robotics-workshop.com/
Topics of interest (indicative but not exclusive)
Bioinspired systems: We seek for works addressing flapping wing robots, perching, manipulation, wind energy harvesting and associated control and pèrception methods
Navigation with constraints in energy, time of flight, and range: We seek for contributions addressing the role of novel designs and associated algorithms.
Resilience in terms of perception, navigation and control: We seek for works addressing the role of multi-modal sensor fusion, robust control, planning and learning-based methods.
Long-term Autonomy: We seek for contributions addressing the challenges and solutions to the problem of large-scale field deployments.
Aerial robotic swarms: We seek for works that aim to enable enhanced team resilience through a system-of-systems approach and mosaic operations.
Reconfigurable aerial robots: We seek for contributions addressing the role of mechanical reconfiguration as opposed to monolithic designs and how advanced navigation algorithms can exploit it.
Field robotics and industry experience: We seek for works that identify challenges observed in field experimentation, calling for new fundamental contributions by the community.