Call for Workshops


The submissions site is open here. Please contact the workshop chairs for any clarifications.

The Organizing Committee for the 2018 Robotics: Science and Systems Conference (RSS 2018) requests proposals for full and half-day workshops, tutorials and demonstrations to be held on June 26-30, 2018 at CMU, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.

The RSS workshops have consistently provided high-quality, topically-focused forums for researchers at the forefront of robotics. This year these events will take place on Friday and Saturday after the main conference.

Workshops are intended to supplement the primary conference; as such we seek workshops that will provide a complement to the large single-track event.

Specifically, we welcome and will give priority to:

  1. Innovative ideas on structuring the events in a way that will promote discussion and interaction among the participants.
  2. Proposals with high-quality, diverse speakers, and which lay out plans for encouraging speakers to focus their talks on the workshop topic (as opposed to delivering generic talks).
  3. Proposals from communities that have not traditionally participated at RSS but are relevant to robotics science, robotics systems, and the practice and philosophy of the discipline and our community more broadly.
  4. Workshops that will encourage analysis and reflection on topics and issues that formulate challenge problems and that promote discussion, debates, and long-term visions for the discipline.

Also, we note that the two special themes for RSS 2018: (1) Field Robotics, and (2) Mechanisms and Design, will also be promoted in the selection of workshops, provided they fulfill the guidelines above.

In addition to traditional workshops, there will be a special “outlier” track that pushes the boundaries of academic workshops by examining ideas that are (i) important for the field, and (ii) poorly treated by the formal peer-review process. Building on the successes of RSS 2017 (one workshop involved aspects of dance, another a custom card game), the track will explore unconventional formats and topics that eschew current orthodoxy.

Submissions

We expect proposals to be approximately 2–3 pages in length, and no more than 5 pages. Here are the proposal template and sample review form.

Important Dates

February 15th, 2018 - Anywhere on Earth - Workshop Submission Deadline

March 15th, 2018 - Workshop Acceptance Notification