Call for Papers

Description

Self-reconfigurable modular robots is an exciting research area that attracts more and more attentions. This full-day workshop is to bring together all active researchers in this area and exchange the newest results, the latest ideas, and the coolest applications, even if they are preliminary. A similar workshop was held in IROS-2007 in San Diego USA, and it had more than 40 participants and 14 presentations. We expect this will be another exciting event because many new research groups for self-reconfigurable robots are emerging around the world.

Self-reconfigurable modular robots are metamorphic systems that can autonomously change their logical or physical configurations (such as shapes, sizes, or formations), as well as their locomotion and manipulation, based on the mission and the environment in hand. Because of their modularity, versatility, self-healing ability and low cost reproducibility, such robots provide a flexible approach for achieving complex tasks in unstructured and dynamic environments. They are well suited for applications such as search and rescue, reconnaissance, self-assembly, inspections in hazardous environments, and exploration in space and ocean. They also pose fundamental research challenges for robotics and other major branches of computer science, mechatronics and control theory.

Research in self-reconfigurable robots have been active in academic for many years, but it is only recently that the results of these research are beginning to be used and applied to serious real-world applications such as sustainable space exploration, homeland security, and others. This workshop comes at the right time because many researchers are seeing the values of the field, and many companies are beginning to investigate their resources, and because it has become ever convincing that modularity and reconfiguration are the keys to construct large systems reliably and economically.

Specific research challenges for self-reconfigurable robots include the dynamic topology of the network of modules, the limited resource (power, size, torque, precisions, etc.) of individual modules, the difficulties in global synchronization, the preclusion of centralized decision makers, and the unreliability of communication among modules. This workshop will present the recent progress in the research community for these challenging tasks and their real-world applications in space and other related fields. We will present and discuss the latest hardware progress, distributed control software, plug-and-play mechatronics, topology-triggered behaviors, and theories of self-reconfiguration. The outcome of the workshop will be a set of papers and a list of new hardware/software challenges for the future of this exciting research area.

We welcome all participants from universities, research labs, industrial companies, and government agencies, who are interested in either research such as modular robots, embedded systems, distributed control, sensor networks, robot swarms, coupling mechanisms, and mechatronics, or applications such as space, underwater, or other complex and difficult environments.

List of tentative topics includes:

• --- The latest hardware progress,
• --- The latest behaviors of self-reconfigurable robots,
• --- Distributed control software,
• --- Plug-and-play mechatronics,
• --- Topology-triggered behaviors,
• --- Theories of self-reconfiguration.
• --- New challenges for future self-reconfigurable robots.

Submission

All accepted work will be published in a citable digital archive of the proceedings.

All submissions should be in PDF format, no less than 4 pages, and should include author/institution information. Submissions should be emailed to shen at isi.edu by July 1, 2008. Notification of acceptance will be given by July 20, 2008.