IROS'13 Workshop on Robots and Sensors integration in future rescue INformation system (ROSIN'13), November 7th, 2013

This full-day workshop will take place November 7th, 2013 during the 2013 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS'13). This workshop is supported by the IEEE Robotics and Automation’s Technical Committee on Safety Security and Rescue Robotics.

Motivation and objectives

Intelligent rescue systems including ITC and robotics technology have been proposed to mitigate disasters, especially in Japan after the 1995 Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake. Ideally, these future search&rescue systems will involve a complex mixture of humans performing high level decision-making, intelligent agents coordinating the response, sensing capabilities to provide real-time observations and possibly mobile robots undertaking physical tasks at difficult or risky remote places in order to provide an efficient disaster response on a large-scale environment. However, there are several challenges to address before such a scenario could take place because the considered environments are prone to uncertainty, ambiguity and incompleteness given their dynamic and evolving nature. First, in the robotic domain for search&rescue most of nowadays robots are operated by humans. While this is required by the harsh conditions commonly found in disaster sites (collapsed buildings, gaps, holes, flooding ...), there are many limitations in human operated robots where the dependency on well-trained operators obviously limits the deployment of such robots. In addition, due the very limited number of available robots and their very customized hardware (both in terms of mobility and actuation capabilities), it is necessary in a disaster recovery campaign to carefully and rapidly identify both the deployment location and the type of the robots to be deployed. Secondly, while the monitoring capability of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) make them very suitable for large scale surveillance systems random deployment can not guarantee coverage both for sensing and connectivity and concerns. In addition, while scalar sensors are quite easy to manage they however provide very limited information compared to what multimedia sensors could bring if video or images were available. In general, a wide range of wireless sensor network applications can be strengthened by introducing a vision capability and, in the domain of search&rescue, which is extremely mission-critical in nature, adding visual capabilities is considered to be of the utmost importance. Unfortunately, video or image sensors are much more difficult to manage on a large scale because of the more demanding resources they need for their operation and for transmitting visual information to a control center.

Therefore the objective of this workshop is to bring together robotics and WSN (Wireless Sensor Networks) researchers to:

ROSIN 2013 is the third workshop dedicated to these issues. ROSIN 2010 took place in 2010 in Taipei, Taiwan during the 2010 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS'10). In this first edition, we accepted 7 papers. 20 people attended the half-day workshop. The proceedings of this workshop are freely available on the web site.

List of topics

This workshop will focus on the tight integration of sensors-robots and information systems during the rescue process. Topics that are of special interest include but are not limited to:

The primary audience of the proposed workshop is intended to be researchers and practitioners both from academia and industry with an interest on integration robots, sensors and information systems in the context of disaster or emergency management. In addition, researchers and practitioners from related communities (disaster management, SDDS, GIS) will find this workshop quite useful.

Submissions guidelines

All submitted papers will be reviewed on the basis of technical quality, relevance, significance, and clarity. At least two reviews for each paper will be conducted. All workshop papers should be submitted electronically in PDF format through the Easychair website and should use the IEEE US letter format.

We are looking for submission of full research papers and experiences reports (up to 6 pages) and work in progress submissions (up to 4 pages). Please create your account on Easychair website as soon as possible if you intend to submit a paper: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=rosin13

Proceedings

Final proceedings are available on arxiv e-print archive: http://arxiv.org/abs/1404.1695

Long papers

Short papers

Important dates

Sept 16, 2013 (Sept 9)
Due date for workshop papers submission (deadline extension)
Oct 4, 2013
Final acceptance
Oct 18, 2013
Camera-ready paper due
November 7, 2013
Workshop date (full day)

Organization committee

Program committee

Internet

Contact

Please contact Serge Stinckwich () for further enquiries about this workshop.