Car'07

CAR 2006 was held in Montpellier.

CAR 2008 will be held in Bourges.

Call for papers, journal JESA
As a follow-up to CAR 2006 and CAR 2007, a call for papers for publication in the journal JESA is currently open. This call is not restricted to authors of CAR 2006 and 2007 but rather open to all contributions. To submit, an intention is due July 20, 2007, and the full paper is due September 15, 2007.

This second national workshop is aimed at addressing important aspects of robot control architectures, with a specific emphasis on distribution, verification and validation, languages and modeling, and implementation of control architectures. 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.

ThemeDue 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 second 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.