Research in robotics has traditionally emphasized low-level sensing and control tasks including sensory processing, path planning, and manipulator design and control. In contrast, research in cognitive robotics is concerned with endowing robots and software agents with higher level cognitive functions that enable them to reason, act and perceive in changing, incompletely known, and unpredictable environments. Such robots must, for example, be able to reason about goals, actions, when to perceive and what to look for, the cognitive states of other agents, time, collaborative task execution, etc. In short, cognitive robotics is concerned with integrating reasoning, perception and action with a uniform theoretical and implementation framework.

The use of both software robots (softbots) and robotic artifacts in everyday life is on the upswing and we are seeing increasingly more examples of their use in society with commercial products around the corner and some already on the market. As interaction with humans increases, so does the demand for sophisticated robotic capabilities associated with deliberation and high-level cognitive functions. Combining results from the traditional robotics discipline with those from AI and cognitive science has and will continue to be central to research in cognitive robotics.

This workshop aims to bring together researchers involved in all aspects of the theory and implementation of cognitive robots, to discuss current work and future directions. The workshop is concerned with foundational research questions on cognitive robotics, as well as robotic system design and robotic applications that utilize AI methods.

Program

Monday Aug 18

Tuesday Aug 19

Invited speakers

• Wolfram Burgard, University of Freiburg, Germany
• Patrick Doherty, Linköping University, Sweden
• Gerhard Neumann, TU Darmstadt, Germany
• Jochen Renz, The Australian National University, Australia
• Markus Vincze, TU Wien, Austria
• Michael Spranger, Sony CSL, Japan

Accepted Papers

• PREGO: An Action Language for Belief-Based Cognitive Robotics in Continuous Domains by Vaishak Belle and Hector Levesque
• Sensor Fusion in the Epistemic Situation Calculus by Christoph Schwering, Tim Niemueller, Gerhard Lakemeyer, Nichola Abdo and Wolfram Burgard
• Scene Interpretation for Lifelong Robot Learning by Mustafa Ersen, Melodi Deniz Ozturk, Mehmet Biberci, Sanem Sariel and Hulya Yalcin
• ExpCog: Experiments in Commonsense Cognitive Robotics by Manfred Eppe, Mehul Bhatt, Jakob Suchan and Brian Tietzen
• An Experimental Comparison of Classical, FOND and Probabilistic Planning by Andreas Hertle, Christian Dornhege, Thomas Keller, Robert Mattmüller, Manuela Ortlieb and Bernhard Nebel
• Mobile Robot Object Recognition through the Synergy of Probabilistic Graphical Models and Semantic Knowledge by José Raúl Ruiz Sarmiento, C. Galindo and J. Gonzalez-Jimenez
• Hybrid Reasoning for Geometric Rearrangement of Multiple Movable Objects on Cluttered Surfaces by Giray Havur, Guchan Ozbilgin, Esra Erdem and Volkan Patoglu
• Too Cool for School - Adding Social Constraints in Human Aware Planning by Stevan Tomic, Federico Pecora and Alessandro Saffiotti
• Knowledge-Aware Execution of Programs in IndiGolog by Clemens Mühlbacher and Gerald Steinbauer.
• Find Out Why Reading This Paper is an Opportunity of Type Opp0 by Jasmin Grosinger, Federico Pecora and Alessandro Saffiotti

Accepted Short Papers

• A MCS-based methodology for computing coalitions in Multirobot Systems by Antonis Bikakis and Patrice Caire
• Improving Planner Performance in Grid Worlds with Macro Actions by Matthew Crosby and Ronald Petrick
• Semantic Perception using Spatial Potential Fields by Malgorzata Goldhoorn and Ronny Hartanto

Topics

We invite submissions of research papers from all researchers and practitioners interested in AI and robotics, and their integration.

Topics of interests include (but are not limited to):

• knowledge representation and reasoning,
• planning,
• scheduling,
• reasoning under uncertainty,
• combination of logical and probabilistic reasoning,
• cooperative decision-making,
• spatiotemporal reasoning,
• diagnostic reasoning,
• commonsense reasoning,
• machine learning,
• symbol grounding,
• cognitive science,
• cognitive vision,
• perception,
• motion planning,
• human-robot interaction,
• natural language understanding,
• speech recognition,
• game AI for robotics.

We especially welcome discussions and demonstrations of robotic applications and implemented robotic systems that utilize AI methods.

Format

This will be a two-day workshop with several sessions including presentations of research papers, position papers, and posters. The workshop will also include discussion panels and a session for live system demonstrations, providing an opportunity to showcase and discuss emerging technologies.

Important dates

• Submission deadline workshop papers: 30 May 2014 (25 May 2014)
• Notification of workshop papers: 23 June 2014

Submission Instructions

• a regular paper (i.e., a technical paper for describing technically sound, innovative ideas that can advance the state of cognitive robotics; an application paper, where the emphasis is on its impact on the robotic application domain; a system/tool paper, where the emphasis is on its novelty, practicality, usability and availability), or
• a short paper (i.e., a position paper describing specific questions and issues that the participants feel should be addressed; a demo paper describing a demonstration of a robotic application, system or tool; a technical communication aimed at describing recent developments, and new projects that are not ready for publication as regular papers).

All papers will be presented during the workshop.

We are actively working towards making a special issue on Cognitive Robotics in a suitable journal. Papers accepted to CogRob will get invited to submit extended versions to the special issue.

Papers accepted at the main ECAI conference (technical sessions) should not be submitted to the workshop unless they are substantially extended or revised; in that case the submission should state how the final version will differ from the ECAI paper.

Submissions are accepted in PDF format only, using the ECAI formatting guidelines at http://ecai2014.guarant.eu/ecai2014.tar.gz.

Author names should be included.

Regular papers must not exceed six (6) and short papers must not exceed two (2) pages, excluding references and appendices. Over-length submissions will be rejected without review.

Papers must be submitted by the due date at the following EasyChair submission site: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cogrob2014

Organising Committee

• Esra Erdem, Sabanci University, Turkey
• Fredrik Heintz, Linköping University, Sweden

Programme Committee

• Alper Aydemir, NASA JPL, USA
• Patrick Beeson, TRACLabs, USA
• Vaishak Belle, University of Toronto, Canada
• Xiaoping Chen, University of Science and Technology of China, China
• Mehmet Dogar, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
• Christian Dornhege, University of Freiburg, Germany
• Malik Ghallab, LAAS-CNRS, France
• Michael Gelfond, Texas Tech University, USA
• Nick Hawes, University of Birmingham, UK
• Joachim Hertzberg, University of Osnabrueck, Germany
• Sertac Karaman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
• Piyush Khandelwal, The University of Texas at Austin, USA
• George Konidaris, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
• Gerhard Lakemeyer, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
• Sheila McIlraith, University of Toronto, Canada
• Daniele Nardi, University of Rome La Sapienza, Italy
• Maurice Pagnucco, The University of New South Wales, Australia
• Volkan Patoglu, Sabanci University, Turkey
• Ron Petrick, University of Edinburgh, UK
• Erion Plaku, Catholic University of America, USA
• Orkunt Sabuncu, University of Potsdam, Germany
• Alessandro Saffiotti, Orebro University, Sweden
• Ken Satoh, National Institute of Informatics and Sokendai, Japan
• Moritz Tenorth, University of Bremen, Germany
• Michael Thielscher, The University of New South Wales, Australia
• Stavros Vassos, University of Rome La Sapienza, Italy
• Markus Vincze, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
• Fangkai Yang, The University of Texas at Austin, USA

Steering Committee

• Michael Beetz, University of Bremen, Germany
• Gerhard Lakemeyer, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
• Hector J. Levesque, University of Toronto, Canada
• Bernhard Nebel, University of Freiburg, Germany
• Fiora Pirri, University of Rome "La Sapienza", Italy
• Erik Sandewall, Linköping University, Sweden
• Murray Shanahan, Imperial College, London, UK
• Sebastian Thrun, Stanford University, USA

Sponsors

CogRob 2014 is generously supported by the AI Journal.

Previous Workshops

First International Cognitive Robotics Workshop (Orlando, Florida), held as part of the AAAI Fall Symposium 1998
Second International Cognitive Robotics Workshop (Berlin, Germany), held in conjunction with ECAI-2000
Third International Cognitive Robotics Workshop (Edmonoton, Canada); held in conjuncion with AAAI-2002
Fourth International Cognitive Robotics Workshop (Valencia, Spain); held in conjunction with ECAI-2004
Fifth International Cognitive Robotics Workshop (Boston, Massachusetts); held in conjunction with AAAI-2006 (http://oldias.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/research/ias/events/cogrob06/)
Sixth International Cognitive Robotics Workshop (Patras, Greece); held in conjunction with ECAI-2008 (http://www.cse.yorku.ca/cogrob08/)
Seventh International Cognitive Robotics Workshop (Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany), 2010 (http://www.dagstuhl.de/en/program/calendar/semhp/?semnr=10081)
Eight International Cognitive Robotics Workshop (Toronto, Canada), 2012 (http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~cogrob/2012/)