Registration Deadline: RAS Summer School on Agricultural Robotics

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
IEEE RAS Summer School on Agricultural Robotics (SSAR 2015)

2-6 February 2015
Sydney, Australia
http://www.acfr.usyd.edu.au/education/ssar2015.shtml

DEADLINE EXTENDED! Applications now due: 8 December 2014 1 December 2014
General enquiries: ssar2015@acfr.usyd.edu.au

APPLICATION AND REGISTRATION
Application details can be found on the SSAR 2015 website (http://www.acfr.usyd.edu.au/education/ssar2015.shtml).
Applications will be processed as received.
Spaces are limited so please send your application as soon as possible.

The Summer School on Agricultural Robotics aims to promote robotics research that will enable safe, efficient, and economical agricultural production. Worldwide, agricultural robotics is an area of rapidly growing interest due to factors that drive agriculture industries to increase the efficiency of production while at the same time engaging in environmental stewardship and contending with complex human labour issues. In Australia, government has set a target of 45% increase in exports by 2025, while the number of farmers in Australia has dropped by 40% since 1981. Robotics has the potential to revolutionise the way food is grown, tended, and harvested, and the School will support this long-term goal by educating young researchers, by fostering collaboration, and by attracting new researchers and engineers to robotics.

The School will consist of three types of activities:
1) lectures by world experts covering a broad range of topics in agricultural robotics
2) hands-on activities that encourage deep learning
3) collaboration activities including a student poster session as well as several social events.

A number of international leaders will present their ideas, algorithms, and systems results with a focus on key open problems and research directions. Students will have the opportunity to interact with these research leaders, and with each other, through the collaboration activities. Both graduate students and established researchers looking to enter the field will be welcomed.

The main technical objective of the School is to cover state-of-the-art results and open problems in key areas of agricultural robotics. Tasks envisioned for agricultural robots include pruning, thinning, harvesting, mowing, spraying, and weed removal. Research topics that underlie these tasks include systems design of outdoor platforms, perception in semistructured outdoor environments (day and night), motion planning for single and multiple robot systems, and manipulation for harvesting and weeding. We will select a set of lecturers with specific expertise that collectively addresses each of these research areas. Lectures will introduce the fundamentals of these topics, summarise known results, and overview main open research questions. We expect that the School will help students and researchers new to agricultural robotics to focus their research direction towards these key problems with the benefit of an update-to-date summary of known results. Students and researchers already working in the area will benefit by increasing their breadth of knowledge and by the opportunity to foster new research collaborations.

Organising Committee
Robert Fitch (Australian Centre for Field Robotics)
Salah Sukkarieh (Australian Centre for Field Robotics)
Marcel Bergerman (Carnegie Mellon University)
Eldert van Henten (Wageningen University)
John Billingsley (University of Southern Queensland, Australia)
John Reid (Moline Technology Innovation Center, John Deere)
Mingcong Deng (Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology)

For more information see: http://www.acfr.usyd.edu.au/education/ssar2015.shtml#registration

Partial funding provided by IEEE RAS