SAB'06 (From Animals to Animats)

Workshop on Swarm Robotics

Rome, Italy
September 30 and October 1, 2006

Organized by: Erol Sahin, William M. Spears and Alan F.T. Winfield

Announcements
Program Committee Members	Authors
Thanks for the reviews!	Workshop program is now available! List of accepted papers Don't forget to register yourself through the SAB'06 web site.. See below! Information for manuscript preparation is available below. A new update on manuscript preparation will be sent shortly! Information about registration and post-proceedings is also available below.

Scope

Swarm robotics is the study of how large numbers of relatively simple physically embodied agents can be designed such that a desired collective behavior emerges from the local interactions among agents and between the agents and the environment. It emerged as a novel approach to the coordination of large numbers of robots. It is inspired from the observation of social insects -ants, termites, wasps and bees- which stand as fascinating examples of how a large number of simple individuals can interact to create collectively intelligent systems. Social insects are known to coordinate their actions to accomplish tasks that are beyond the capabilities of a single individual: termites build large and complex mounds, army ants organize impressive foraging raids, ants can collectively carry large preys. Such coordination capabilities are still beyond the reach of current multi-robot systems.

Research on swarm robotics has been on the rise during the last decade. A number of successful swarm robotic systems have already been developed and the study of coordination in swarm robotic systems has become a hot topic of research. The workshop will be a sequel to the first swarm robotics workshop organized within SAB 2004 with great success and will aim to review the recent advances on the topic.

Papers on any aspect of Swarm Robotics would be welcome, but especially

Experimental swarm robotics systems, in the lab or simulation;
Swarm Intelligence algorithms for robotics applications;
Actual or proposed real-world applications of swarm robotics;
Modeling and mathematical analysis of swarm robotics;
Simulation or design tools for swarm robotics;
Architectural/hardware advances that aid the development of swarm robotics systems;
Principled design approaches to engineering emergence;
Approaches for assuring dependability or stability of swarms.

Although the initial motivation for much of the work in swarm robotics stems from ethological metaphors, this workshop is not limited to this. Swarm robotics systems based on immune systems, chemical/physical systems, etc. are welcome, as long as the robotics aspect is clear.

The workshop will accept review and research papers based on blind review. During first workshop, the emphasis was to provide a review of the field, and reviews of major projects and major research tracks were invited, with a relatively fewer number of research papers. This workshop will focus on the recent results from swarm robotics research.

Program Committee

Gerardo Beni, University of California at Riverside, CA, USA.
Marco Dorigo, IRIDIA, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
John Feddema, Sandia National Lab., NM, USA
Paolo Gaudiano, Icosystem Corp., MA, USA
Veysel Gazi, TOBB University of Economics and Technology, Turkey
Kristina Lerman, Information Sciences Institute, U. of Southern California, CA, USA
Alcherio Martinoli, EPFL, Switzerland, and Caltech, CA, USA
Francesco Mondada, EPFL, Switzerland
Lynne E. Parker, University of Tennessee, TN, USA.
David Payton, HRL Labs, CA, USA
Joerg Seyfried, IPR, Universitaet Karlsruhe(TH), Germany.
Kasper Støy, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark
Guy Theraulaz, Universite Paul Sabatier Toulouse, France
Cem Unsal, Yahoo! Inc., CA, USA
Richard Vaughan, Simon Frasier University, Canada

Important dates (tentative)

Full paper submission	July 1, 2006
Notification of Acceptance	August 1, 2006
Revised paper (to be distributed at the workshop)	September 1, 2006
Workshop	September 30 and October 1, 2006

Proceedings and manuscript preparation

The post-proceedings of the workshop will be published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science as a sequel to the post-proceedings of the first workshop.
Prepare your manuscripts in the LNCS format, using the detailed instructions for manuscript preparation available here. Your manuscripts are expected to be upto 15 pages long.
Use the ConfTool to register yourself and submit your manuscript.

Registration and post-proceedings

Registration to the workshop will be handled by SAB'06.
For each accepted paper, at least one registration is required.
For each accepted paper, one copy of the post-proceedings, as published by Springer, will be mailed to the authors.

Venue

The workshop will be held in Rome, Italy after the SAB'06 conference. More information is available at the SAB'06 web site.

News

Up-to-date information about the workshop will be made available at this page:

http://www.swarm-robotics.org/SAB06/