This first national workshop is aimed at addressing important aspects of robot control architectures, with a specific emphasis on software aspects. It brings together researchers and practitioners from universities, institutions and industries, working in this field. It intends to be a meeting to expose and discuss gathered expertise, identified trends and issues, as well as new scientific results and applications around software control architectures related topics, through plenary invited papers.
Theme
Due to their
increasing complexity, nowadays intervention robots, that
to say those dedicated for instance to exploration,
security or defence applications, definitely raise huge
scientific and commercial issues. Whatever the considered
environment, terrestrial, aerial, marine or even spatial,
this complexity mainly derives from the integration of
multiple functionalities: advanced perception, planification, navigation, autonomous behaviours, in
parallel with teleoperation or robots coordination enable
to tackle more and more difficult missions.
But robots can
only be equipped with such functions if an appropriate
hardware and software structure is embedded: the software
architectures will hence be the main concern of this
workshop.
As quoted above, the control
architecture is thus a necessary element for the
integration of a multitude of works; it also permits to
cope with technological advances that continually offer
new devices for communication, localisation, computing,
etc. As a matter of fact, it should be modular, reusable,
scalable and even readable (ability to analyse and
understand it). Besides, such properties ease the sharing
of competencies among the robotics community, but also
with computer scientists and automatics specialists as the
domain is inherently a multidisciplinary one.
Numerous solutions have been proposed,
based on the "classical" three layers architecture or on
more "modern" approaches such as object or component
oriented programming. Actually, almost every robot
integrates its own architecture; the workshop will thus be
a real opportunity to share reflections on these solutions
but also on related needs, especially standardisation
ones, which are of particular importance in military
applications for instance.
Hence, this first
national workshop on control architectures of robots aims
at gathering a large number of robotics actors (researchers,
manufacturers as well as state institutions) in order to
highlight the multiple issues, key difficulties and
potential sources of advances.
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