The RSS workshops and tutorials provide high-quality, topically-focused forums for researchers at the forefront of robotics. This year these events will take place on June 27 and July 1. Workshops and tutorials are intended to supplement the primary conference; as such we seek workshops that will provide a complement to the research in the proceedings being presented in the primary single-track event and tutorials that could support researchers new to the field in quickly gaining the necessary skills and knowledge.

The RSS conference is planned as a hybrid event and at this time we expect that workshops/tutorials will follow suit with a combination of in-person and virtual activities. However, the COVID-19 situation is fluid, and the conference organizers will make more details available at a later date.

We are looking for workshops and tutorials that promote discussion and interaction among the participants. We will select workshops and tutorials based on their educational value, interest, and relevance. Specifically, we welcome and will give priority to:

•              Fully elaborated proposals with confirmed, high-quality, diverse invited speakers as well as solicited posters or presentations. Specifically, we encourage organizers to consider, among others, the diversity of presenters in terms of:

o             Seniority and academic rank (consider inviting senior Ph.D. students and postdocs whose work you appreciate instead of just professors and senior researchers)

o             Gender

o             Race and ethnicity

o             Geographic location

o             Industry, government, and academia

•              Innovative event structures that will encourage discussion and interaction among the participants. Previous examples include structured debates or groupings of senior and junior researchers for brainstorming of new topics for research.

•              Proposals from communities that have not traditionally participated at RSS but are relevant to robotics science, robotics systems, the practice, and the philosophy of the discipline.

•              Tutorials focusing on tools commonly used in work presented at RSS or showcasing new libraries which the community can leverage.

•              Workshops that will encourage analysis and reflection on topics and issues that formulate challenge problems and that promote discussion, debates, and long-term vision.

In order to ensure participation in the workshops we highly recommend speakers agree to participate in no more than 2 accepted workshops and tutorials. We ask workshop organizers to explicitly remind and verify this recommendation with the invited speakers.

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. 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. The proposal template can be found at:        

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XXnRBdTjt46K45I1NUdPjWEp01luKlTLEtfHlgc_n3c/edit 

Workshop proposals should be submitted via Easy Chair at 
https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=2022rssworkshop

Please contact the workshop chairs for any clarifications:               

Shuran Song, Columbia University, shurans@cs.columbia.edu      

Katja Mombaur, University of Waterloo, katja.mombaur@uwaterloo.ca

Important Dates

•              Workshop Proposal Submission Deadline: February 18th, 2022

•              Acceptance Notification: March 4th, 2022

•              Workshop dates: June 27 and July 1, 2022

More details: https://roboticsconference.org/information/cfw/