Call for Workshop Proposals

The ICRA 2016 Organizing Committee proposes an innovative formula for workshops and, separately, for tutorials to meet two primary objectives. First of all, given the evolution of the main conference tracks with an ever growing interest and volume of contributions, to provide a venue for young researchers to listen to and actually interact with senior figures. This goes hand-in-hand with the second objective of ensuring the highest quality content, such that attendees get the most out of the expected exchange of ideas, and there is a proper forum for really digging into details.

Concretely, for workshop proposals this means having of confirmed speakers with an appropriate track record, in addition to clearly indicating the relevance of the topic and a significant expected impact. The Workshops Chairs will verify the list of confirmed speakers during the proposal evaluation. For this purpose, evidence of speakers’ confirmation, which can be demonstrated with the supplement of an accepted message including the title and brief abstract of their talk, is strongly recommended.

On the other hand, tutorials will be by invitation only, focusing on providing highest quality education in the advanced topics that are at the foundations of cutting edge robotics and automation research.

We invite proposals for half-day or full-day workshops. These workshops will be held both before and after the main conference, on Monday, May 16 and Friday, May 20, 2016. They will take place at the main conference venue.

Workshops promote informal discussion of an active research area. We particularly welcome creative new formats for workshops that increase the number of participants, that encourage participants to stay for the full duration of the event, that enhance discussion among participants, that increase the level of interaction between established experts and early-career researchers, and that make useful connections to fields outside of robotics. We suggest striving for a good balance between invited senior speakers and early-career researchers that present their work for instance during a poster session.

Important Dates

  • September 15, 2015: Deadline for submitting workshop proposals
  • January 15, 2015: Notification of acceptance
  • February 15, 2016: Deadline for workshop website with title, abstract, and preliminary schedule including the invited speakers
  • March 15, 2016: Submission of final 1-page workshop description for the conference digest
  • May 16 and May 20, 2016: Workshops held at ICRA 2016

All deadlines are 23:59:00 US Pacific Time.

Submission Guidelines

A workshop proposal must be a pdf file submitted via PaperPlaza and should follow this template (pdf,docx).

In summary, the proposal must have these elements:

  • Title
  • Duration (specify half-day or full-day)
  • Organizers
  • Website URL
  • Abstract (200 words maximum)
  • Content (500 words maximum)
  • List of confirmed speakers (please attach confirmation messages from speakers, with title and abstract of talk)
  • Plan to solicit participation (500 words maximum)
  • Plan to encourage interaction among participants (500 words maximum)
  • Equipments (anything needed other than a projector and screen).
  • Support of an IEEE RAS Technical Committee. Indicate if the event is in conjunction with a RAS TC.

We look forward to hosting your workshops at ICRA 2016!

ICRA 2016 Workshops Chairs

Maren Bennewitz <maren@informatik.uni-freiburg.de>

Roland Philippsen <roland.philippsen@gmx.net>

Jun Morimoto <xmorimo@atr.jp>

ICRA 2016 Tutorials Chairs

Bruno Siciliano <siciliano@unina.it>

Nikos Tsagarakis <nikos.tsagarakis@iit.it>