SECOND CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS- Workshop: Embodied sensorimotor interaction: from locomotion to collective behavior at SWARM2015

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Wednesday, October 28 (full-day), Kyoto University, Japan

Deadline for poster abstract submission: June 30, 2015

Notification of acceptance: July 31, 2015

Workshop Overview

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Animals show fascinating adaptive and versatile abilities. For example, they can move around and at the same time avoid obstacles in order to successfully navigate through their complex cluttered environment for finding their food source. While moving, they can also adapt their locomotion to deal with unknown situations. Furthermore, they can interact with each other to form collective behavior for anti-predator, enhanced foraging, and even increased locomotion efficiency. These complex achievements emerge from tightly as well as loosely coupled interactions between many ingredients including biomechanics (i.e., morphology, muscles, and materials), sensory feedback, centralized/decentralized mechanisms, and communication. Developing these key ingredients and implementing them in artificial systems to approach the level of performance of living creatures remains a grand challenge. To address these issues, our workshop at SWARM 2015 (http://www.ohk.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/SWARM2015/), “Embodied sensorimotor interaction: from locomotion to collective behavior” will bring together leading experts, working in the domains of bio-inspired robotics, swarm robotics, modular robotics, embodied AI, evolutionary robotics, and computational neuroscience, to present their recent developments on robot locomotion and collective behavior and discuss future directions to overcome this challenge.

The full-day workshop is composed of the following parts:

1) Invited talks by experts from swarm robotics, bio-inspired locomotion control, and embodied AI,

2) poster presentations,

3) Discussion and future steps

We are also pleased to invite contributions in the form of 1 page conf. style abstract http://www.ohk.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/SWARM2015/ on (but are not limited to) the following topics. The selected contributions will be presented in a form of a poster during the workshop. We particularly encourage young scientists to contribute and attend, even presenting their research at an early stage an engage in discussions. We also welcome live demonstrations on robot locomotion and collective behavior. Submissions have to be sent to poma@mmmi.sdu.dk in PDF format. One author per accepted workshop contribution (poster, demo) and attendee are required to register (http://www.ohk.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/SWARM2015/).

The Workshop topics include (but are not limited to) the following:

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- Bio-inspired robotics (e.g., walking robots, flying robots, etc.),

- Locomotion control,

- Collective behavior control,

- Swarm and self-organizing systems (e.g., modular robots)

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Tentative List of Speakers:

· Dario Floreano (Laboratory of Intelligent Systems, EPFL, Switzerland)

· John Hallam (Centre for BioRobotics, The Maersk Mc-Kinney Moller Institute, SDU, Denmark)

· Kasper Støy (IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark)

· Nora Ayanian (the Automatic Coordination of Teams Lab, USC Viterbi School of Engineering, USA)

· Koh Hosoda (Dept. of Adaptive Machine Systems, Grad. school of Engineering, Osaka University, Japan)

· Yulia Sandamirskaya (Institute for Neural Computation, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany)

· Shinya Aoi (Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Graduate School of Engineering, Kyoto University, Japan)

· Yuichi Ambe (Dept. of Mechanical Engineering and Science, Graduate School of Engineering, Kyoto University, Japan)

· Poramate Manoonpong (Embodied AI & Neurorobotics Lab, Centre for BioRobotics, The Maersk Mc-Kinney Moller Institute, SDU, Denmark)

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We hope that you will be able to attend and look forward to seeing you in Kyoto, Japan!

The workshop organizers:

Florentin Wörgötter, Poramate Manoonpong, Yuichi Ambe, Shinya Aoi