Dear

colleague,

We are pleased to inform you that ICARSC 2021 – IEEE International Conference on Autonomous Robot Systems and Competitions will be held at Santa Maria da Feira, Portugal, on April 28-29, 2021.

The conference is co-located with ROBOTICA 2021 – The Portuguese Robotics Open, a RoboCup-sponsored local event, and is promoted by the University of Aveiro, University of Coimbra, Polytechnic Institute of Tomar and the Portuguese Robotics Society.

The conference is planned to take place in a hybrid mode, allowing remote participation along with physical presence.

UPDATE: Due to the COVID19 pandemic, the conference will take place only in virtual modality.

== Conference Scope ==

ICARSC gathers participants from academia and industry working in the field of autonomous robotics and related areas. ICARSC is a well established IEEE conference that has been growing continuously for over a decade and is nowadays a truly international forum attracting worldwide quality research papers.

ICARSC has long been an IEEE co-sponsored event and its proceedings will be indexed in IEEExplore and Scopus. Moreover, similarly to previous editions, extended versions of selected best papers will be invited for publication at relevant indexed journals.

== Invited Speakers ==

Peter Stone, Austin University, USA

Miguel Ángel Sotelo, University of Alacalá de Henares, Spain

== Important Dates ==

Submission   Feb 15, 2021

Notification Mar 22, 2021

Camera Ready Mar 29, 2021

Registration Apr 9, 2021

Conference   Apr 28-29, 2021

== Conference Topics ==

The conference aims to gather researchers from the industry and academia to present and discuss the latest trends in research and technology in the fields of robotics and related areas.

Contributions from researchers, industry and outputs from collaboration between industrial and academic R&D units are welcome in, but not limited to, the following topics.

– Agricultural Robotics

– Applications of Autonomous Intelligent Robots

– Artificial Intelligence

– Autonomous Robotic Systems

– Computer Vision and Image Processing

– Control Architectures and Programming

– Cooperative Perception

– Cooperative Planning and Task Allocation

– Dexterous Manipulation and Grasping

– Educational Robotics

– Entertainment Robots

– Evolutionary Robotics

– Humanoid Robotics

– Human-Robot Interaction

– Localization, Mapping, and Navigation

– Locomotion and Actuation Systems

– Multi-Robot Coordination

– Multi-Robot Systems

– Planning, Reasoning and Modelling

– Recognition and Tracking

– Robot Learning

– Robotic Competitions

– Robotic Simulation

– Sensors and Sensor Integration

– Swarm Robotics

– Underwater Robotics

== Paper Submission ==

Authors are invited to submit original research contributions in English.

Six pages in the standard IEEE format: 

https://www.ieee.org/conferences/publishing/templates.html

are allowed for each paper, including tables and figures. Full papers should be submitted electronically, in PDF format, using the easychair.org platform: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=icarsc2021 

Reviewing for ICARSC 2021 will be *double blind* so authors must remove their names from the submitted papers and should take reasonable care not to indirectly disclose their identity. 

Accepted papers will be scheduled for presentation, which requires that at least one of the authors must register at the Conference and present the paper. Failure to meet this requirement will imply removing the paper from the online version of the proceedings. 

A selection of the presented papers will be invited to propose extended versions for a special issue of the Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems (https://www.springer.com/journal/10846).

Besides the conference best paper award, there will also be a best paper award promoted by the Industrial Robot Journal that can be further extended for publication in the journal.

See you in Santa Maria da Feira!

UPDATE: Due to the COVID19 pandemic, the conference will take place only in virtual modality.

Vitor Santos, Universidade of Aveiro, IEETA, Portugal

Nuno Lau, Universidade of Aveiro, IEETA, Portugal

Pedro Neto, Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal

Ana Lopes, Instituto Politécnico de Tomar, Portugal

(Co-chairs of ICARSC 2021)

Please check further details at https://www.festivalnacionalrobotica.pt/icarsc/

Should you have any question please contact sec@sprobotica.pt