RAM Upcoming special issues

Special issue on Formal Methods for Robotics and Automation
Guest editors: Hadas Kress-Gazit,
Paper submission deadline: January 01, 2011
Special issue on Towards a WWW for Robots
Guest editors: Toshio Fukuda, Michael Beetz, Rene van de Molengraft,
Paper submission deadline: November 01, 2010
Special issue on Roboethics
Guest editors: Gianmarco Veruggio, Mike Van der Loos, Jorge Solis,
Paper submission deadline: September 15, 2010 (extended)
Special issue on Robot Authentication
Guest editors: Marina Gavrilova, Roman V. Yampolskiy,
Paper submission deadline: May 01, 2010

Special issue on Formal Methods for Robotics and Automation

Guaranteeing safety, predictability and reliability of robots and their high-level behaviors is crucial for the assimilation of such systems into society, be it at home or in the workplace. Every robotics researcher working with physical robots is aware of safety issues; however, only recently people have begun to look at ways to either formally prove or guarantee by design different behavioral properties such as safety and correctness.
While formal methods have been successfully applied to areas such as hardware design, the unique nature of robotics requires new theory and algorithms for verification and synthesis of correct systems. Researchers are invited to contribute papers that explore the state of the art in formal methods for robotics and automation.

Special issue on Towards a WWW for Robots

IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine (RAM) seeks articles for this special issue, scheduled for publication in June 2011.

The autonomous robotics community is starting to tackle more and more complex manipulation activities, such as doing household chores, in more and more realistic operating environments such as human working and living environments. One of the biggest challenges in such applications is the open-endedness of the task domains and the enormous amount of knowledge needed to achieve reliable task success. Luckily almost every robot has access to the World Wide Web, the world's largest knowledge and information source.

While up to now robots have only made limited use of the web as an information and knowledge source the opportunities are obvious and manifold. Robots can use search engines such as Google images, video, or 3D warehouse. They can also ask for the help from humans using tools such as the Amazon Mechanical Turk. Or, robots could perhaps form communities to build up huge common knowledge
bases, much in the same spirit as people work on Wikipedia. Or, robots could reproduce the situations they cannot handle in web games and observe how the players deal with the situations and what the consequences might be.

Special issue on Roboethics

Robotics research is increasingly raising ethical implications related to the emerging interactions between robots and human beings. Roboethics deals with the ethical aspects of the design, development and employment of intelligent machines. It shares many "sensitive areas" with computer ethics, information ethics and bioethics. Progress in the field of computer science and telecommunications allows us to endow machines with enough intelligence so that they may act autonomously. Therefore, we can forecast that in the twenty-first century humanity will coexist with the first alien intelligence we have ever come in contact with – robots. However; as the application field for robots is widening, and the robot is coming out of the factory halls, new challenges are seen, and even a change of paradigm is taking shape. Not only roboticists, but also sociologists, psychologists and philosophers are discussing the potentialities and the limits of these intelligent machines in relation to human beings.

Special issue on Robot Authentication

The goal of this Special Issue is to concentrate specifically on unique aspects of automatic identification of artificial entities (robots, bots, avatars, etc.) and complementary problem of human recognition by such artificial agents. The issue concentrates on all aspects of human/robot recognition, which spans the fields of robotics, as well as biometrics, security, artificial intelligence, pattern recognition, cognitive science, virtual reality and many other domains.