March 2025 - RoboCup-worldwide

[Call for Participation] IEEE RAS ICRA 2025 LA@Chile Satellite
by Javier Ruiz-del-Solar 25 Mar '25

25 Mar '25

IEEE RAS ICRA 2025 LA@Chile Satellite Santiago (Chile) in person, 20-22 May 2025 http://icra25lasat.ieeechile.cl We are pleased to announce the IEEE RAS ICRA 2025 LA@Chile Satellite, a satellite event of the ICRA 2025 conference sponsored by IEEE RAS. The primary objective of this event is to provide remote participation opportunities in Chile for researchers and students from Latin America to ICRA 2025, along with access to on-site keynote and plenary talks, young researchers & Ph.D. sessions, an undergraduate & graduate poster competition, and hands-on courses. The IEEE RAS ICRA 2025 LA@Chile Satellite will not charge registration fees and will provide travel grants for Latin American students. Our long-term goals are as follows: - to build a sustainable community of students and researchers in Robotics and Automation in Latin America, - to make cutting-edge scientific topics accessible to Latin American researchers and students, and - to foster intercultural student collaboration within and outside Latin America. Summary of Main Activities Streaming of plenary and keynote sessions from ICRA 2025 On-site International Plenary Sessions and Local Keynotes Young Researchers and Ph.D. Sessions Student Poster Session (graduate and undergraduate) Hands-on course Program The program will be finalized after the ICRA 2025 program is confirmed and the applications for participation in the Young & Ph.D. Researchers Sessions are received. Registration This is a free event. Click here <https://forms.gle/Xzs5cfJ9Ru2zqcjq9> to register. Travel Grant Application If you want to apply for a travel grant, select the travel grant option when you register. The travel grants will be awarded based on the quality of the poster contribution as well as diversity criteria (gender, origin, etc.). Ph.D. & Young Researchers Sessions If you are a young researcher (with a Ph.D. from the last five years) or a Ph.D. student finishing your thesis, you are invited to present your research in our Young Researchers & Ph.D. Sessions. To apply to present in these sessions, please email our program chairs (jugodoy(a)udec.cl & rodrigo.verschae(a)uoh.cl) and send: a copy of your CV, a link to your Google Scholar profile, and the title of your presentation. Hands-on Course Information about the hands-on courses will be published on our website within the next few weeks. Confirmed Speakers We are currently confirming the speakers for the plenary and keynote sessions. For now, the confirmed speakers are: Jan Peters (TU Darmstadt), Martin Adams (Universidad de Chile), Stefan Escaida (Universidad de O’Higgins) Rodrigo Verschae (Universidad de O’Higgins). The latest list of confirmed speakers will be available on the website. Timeline 2025/03/19: ICRA RAS 2025 LA@Chile Satellite website goes live 2025/03/25: Registration opens 2025/03/25: Travel grants application opens 2025/03/25: Application for the Ph.D. & Young Researchers Sessions opens 2025/04/22: Travel grants application closes 2025/04/22: Application for the Ph.D. & Young Researchers Sessions closes 2025/04/25: Poster acceptance notification, Travel Grant notification 2025/05/13: Registration closes Venue: IEEE RAS ICRA 2025 LA@Chile Satellite will be hosted at the Faculty of Engineering & Sciences, Universidad de Chile (Beauchef 851, Santiago, Chile). We would like to highlight that there are limited spots for this event. They will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis as registrations are completed. Please visit our website, where you can find more information regarding travel, travel grants, and lodging: http://icra25lasat.ieeechile.cl/index.html If you have any questions about the school or the application process, please contact the organizing committee: icra25lasat(a)ieeechile.cl Best regards from the organizing committee,

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RoboCup International Symposium 2025 first call for papers
by Rudi Villing 18 Mar '25

18 Mar '25

Call for papers RoboCup International Symposium 2025 https://2025.robocup.org/symposium/ Monday 21 July 2025 Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. The 28th RoboCup International Symposium will be held on 21 July 2025, in conjunction with RoboCup 2025 (15 July to 20 July 2024), in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. We call for submissions of papers reporting innovative, original research with relevance to areas of robotics and artificial intelligence as listed below. Within the described scope of topics, we also encourage submissions of high-quality overview articles, papers describing real-world research, and papers reporting theoretical results. Researchers are invited to submit their work independently of whether they participate in the RoboCup competitions or have a RoboCup team. The symposium will be held in person at the Salvador Convention Center (CCS), Av. Octávio Mangabeira, 5.490 Boca do Rio - Salvador - Bahia - Brazil. In addition to the regular track with regular research papers, there is the development track encouraging reports on innovative hardware developments, software frameworks, and open-source releases of software components. A review of papers describing these contributions will be based on technical aspects and benefits to the practice of communities working in the above fields in general and RoboCup in particular. IMPORTANT DATES Submission of full papers: 7 April 2025 Notification to authors: 16 May 2025 Submission of camera-ready copies: 30 May 2025 RoboCup Symposium 2025: 21 July 2025 (RoboCup on 15-20 July 2025) SUBMISSION AND PROCEEDINGS All papers will be peer-reviewed and evaluated by members of the senior program committee. The proceedings of the RoboCup International Symposium will be published and archived within the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNCS/LNAI) series by Springer-Verlag after the conference. Papers should be formatted following the LNAI author guidelines (https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-gu…) and must be electronically submitted through Springer’s electronic-submission system EquinOCS. (The link to submit papers will be provided in the second call for papers email). Submissions are limited to 12 pages including references. The LNAI author guidelines site contains a Springer’s proceedings LaTeX template (v2.24), and a link to the template in Overleaf: (https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/springer-lecture-notes-in-computer…) TOPICS Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: * Robot Hardware and Software - mobile robotics - humanoid robotics - sensors and actuators - embedded and mobile devices - robot construction and new materials - robot system integration - robot software architectures - robot programming environments and languages - real-time and concurrent programming - robot simulators - sim2real learning * Perception and Action - 3D perception - distributed sensor integration - sensor noise filtering - real-time image processing and pattern recognition - motion and sensor models - sensory-motor control - robot kinematics and dynamics - high-dimensional motion control * Robot Cognition and Learning - world modelling and knowledge representation - learning from demonstration and imitation - localisation, navigation, and mapping - planning and reasoning - decision making under uncertainty - neural systems and deep learning - complex motor skill acquisition - reinforcement learning and optimisation - motion and sensor model learning * Human-Robot Interaction - robot social intelligence - fluency of interaction - speech synthesis and natural language generation - natural language recognition - explainable robot behaviours - emotion recognition and reaction - understanding human intent and behaviour - safety, security and dependability - enabling humans to predict robot behaviour * Multi-Robot Systems - team coordination methods - communication protocols - learning and adaptive systems - teamwork and heterogeneous agents - dynamic resource allocation - adjustable autonomy * Education and Edutainment - robotics and artificial intelligence education - educational robotics - robot kits and programming tools - robotic entertainment * Applications and Benchmarking - search and rescue robots - robot surveillance - service and social robots - robots at home, at work and in public spaces - robots in the real world - performance metrics - human-robot interaction DEVELOPMENT TRACK To encourage open-source release of hardware and software systems, the RoboCup International Symposium has included a development track in recent years. In 2025, the scope of this track includes datasets and benchmarks. We encourage the submission of papers describing open-source hardware and software, tools and frameworks that facilitate development of robotics hardware and software, datasets that enable new robotic capabilities, as well as benchmarks that establish reproducible test beds and performance metrics to advance research. If applicable, contributions to the special track should include evidence of the released system or dataset, and highlight past, ongoing, and/or potential future impacts on the RoboCup community. A review of these contributions will be based on technical merit and benefits to the RoboCup community, and the research topics listed above. PROGRAM CO-CHAIRS Ana Patrícia Fontes Magalhães Mascarenhas (UNEB, Brazil) Alexander Ferrein (FH Aachen University of Applied Sciences, Germany) Rudi Villing (Maynooth University, Ireland) LOCAL ORGANIZERS Marco Antônio Costa Simões (UNEB, Brazil) Reinaldo Bianchi (Centro Universitário FEI, Brazil) CONTACT You can contact via the PC chairs via the contact button in EquinOCS VISA INFORMATION If you are a citizen of a country that needs a Visa for traveling to the Brazil, please start the VISA process as soon as possible. If you are not sure if you are eligible for a VISA-exemption, please consult the official website of the Brazilian government for information, at https://www.gov.br/mre/pt-br/assuntos/portal-consular/vistos/informacoes-so… (Information is in English below each paragraph in Portuguese).

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MATLAB Update for RoboCup
by Jose Avendano Arbelaez 17 Mar '25

17 Mar '25

Dear RoboCup Teams and Mentors, Here is a quick update from MathWorks for all RoboCup competition participants: 1. MATLAB/Simulink Licenses for all RoboCup Teams can be requested here<https://www.mathworks.com/academia/student-competitions/robocup.html>. 2. The RoboCup ARM Challenge<https://arm.robocup.org/> in partnership with MathWorks is accepting registrations until April 11th. 3. MathWorks Call for Research Proposals<https://www.mathworks.com/academia/research/call-for-research-proposals.html> is open until May 30th. 4. Here are links to new features in MATLAB and Simulink for Robotics and Autonomous Systems for R2024b (R2025a is coming soon): * Robotics Systems Toolbox<https://www.mathworks.com/help/robotics/release-notes.html> * Navigation Toolbox<https://www.mathworks.com/help/nav/release-notes.html> * UAV Toolbox<https://www.mathworks.com/help/uav/release-notes.html> * ROS Toolbox<https://www.mathworks.com/help/ros/release-notes.html> 5. Contact me, Jose Avendano josea(a)mathworks.com<mailto:josea@mathworks.com> if your team has questions or would like help with MATLAB and Simulink for robotics. Best of luck for the rest of the season! Looking forward to all your amazing projects. Sincerely, Jose Avendano Robotics and Autonomous Systems The MathWorks

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[meetings] [news] 2nd CfP: The 4th Benchmark for Autonomous Robot Navigation (BARN) Challenge -- ICRA 2025 Competition
by Xuesu Xiao 14 Mar '25

14 Mar '25

IROS 2025 deadline is behind us. So it’s time to work on The BARN Challenge at ICRA 2025! Submission Form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfYFw_BVg-7lpXNVxQIX_xQKpFrU2m4jrX… Competition Website: https://cs.gmu.edu/~xiao/Research/BARN_Challenge/BARN_Challenge25.html Participation Instructions: https://github.com/Daffan/nav-competition-icra2022 Lessons Learned from The BARN Challenge 2024: https://cs.gmu.edu/~xiao/papers/barn24_report.pdf Lessons Learned from The BARN Challenge 2023: https://cs.gmu.edu/~xiao/papers/barn23_report.pdf Lessons Learned from The BARN Challenge 2022: https://cs.gmu.edu/~xiao/papers/barn22_report.pdf Dear roboticists, are you interested in agile robot navigation in highly constrained spaces with a lot of obstacles around, e.g., cluttered households or after-disaster scenarios? Do you think mobile robot navigation is mostly a solved problem? Are you looking for a hands-on project for your robotics class, but may not have (sufficient) robot platforms for your students? If your answer is yes to any of the above questions, we sincerely invite you to participate in The 4th BARN Challenge at ICRA 2025 (https://cs.gmu.edu/~xiao/Research/BARN_Challenge/BARN_Challenge25.html)! The BARN Challenge aims at evaluating state-of-the-art autonomous navigation systems to move robots through highly constrained environments in a safe and efficient manner. The task is to navigate a standardized Clearpath Jackal robot from a predefined start to a goal location as quickly as possible without any collision. The challenge will take place both in the simulated BARN dataset and in physical obstacle courses at ICRA 2025. 1. The competition task is designing ground navigation systems to navigate through all 300 BARN environments (https://cs.gmu.edu/~xiao/Research/BARN/BARN.html) and physical obstacle courses constructed at ICRA 2025 as fast as possible without collision. 2. The 300 BARN environments can be the training set for learning-based methods, or to design classical approaches in. During the simulation competition, we will generate another 50 unseen environments unavailable to the participants before the competition. 3. We will standardize a Jackal robot in the Gazebo simulation, including a Hokuyo 2D LiDAR, motor controller of 2m/s max speed, etc. 4. Participants can use any approaches to tackle the navigation problem, such as using classical sampling-based or optimization-based planners, end-to-end learning, or hybrid approaches. We will provide baselines for reference. 5. A standardized scoring system is provided on the website. 6. We will invite the top teams in simulation to compete in the real world. The team who achieves the fastest collision-free navigation in the physical obstacle courses wins. If you are interested in participating, please submit your navigation system at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfYFw_BVg-7lpXNVxQIX_xQKpFrU2m4jrX… Co-Organizers: Xuesu Xiao (George Mason University) Zifan Xu (UT Austin) Aniket Datar (George Mason University) Saad Abdul Ghani (George Mason University) Peter Stone (UT Austin / Sony AI) Sponsor: Clearpath Robotics, https://clearpathrobotics.com/ Thanks Xuesu ----------------------- Xuesu Xiao, Ph.D. -- Assistant Professor Department of Computer Science George Mason University xiao(a)gmu.edu https://cs.gmu.edu/~xiao/ https://robotixx.cs.gmu.edu/

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[meetings][cfp] Extended deadline for RO-MAN 2025 Special Session on Theory of Mind
by alexarossi＠gmail.com 14 Mar '25

14 Mar '25

Dear everyone, It is my pleasure to invite you to submit your work at our special session on "*Theory of Mind in Human-Robot Interaction*" at the 34th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication 2025 (IEEE RO-MAN 2025), which will take place in Eindhoven, Netherlands, from 25 to 29 August 2025. Please note that the deadline for submissions has been extended at *March 20th, 2025*. You can submit your works at our special sessions via https://ras.papercept.net/ by using the special session category and *code 'g19y9'*. Do not hesitate to get in touch with us for further information! Below you can also find the CFP. best regards Alessandra Dr Patrick Holthaus, University of Hertfordshire (UK), p.holthaus(a)herts.ac.uk Dr Alessandra Rossi, University of Naples Federico II (IT), alessandra.rossi(a)unina.it -- Alessandra Rossi, PhD Assistant Professor Fellow of the Higher Education Academy Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technologies - D.I.E.T.I. University of Naples Federico II Via Claudio, 21, 80125 - Naples, Italy w-page:https://alessandrarossi.net e-mail address:alessandra.rossi@unina.it e-mail address:a.rossi@herts.ac.uk X: @alhandra81 *SPECIAL SESSION @ RO-MAN 2025 * *Theory of Mind in Human-Robot Interaction* The ability to understand and acknowledge others' mental states is known as the Theory of Mind (ToM). Theory of Mind is a multi-modal system people use to communicate and understand each other naturally. A growing group of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) research focuses on investigating whether people form ToM towards robots, and what level of ToM a robot should have to communicate transparently with the humans in their shared environment in a sociable and accepted way. Robots that encounter humans should be able to perform transparent motions and behaviours, and, at the same time, be able to clearly recognise the humans’ intentions and behaviours. In this session, we want to explore which cognitive skills a robot needs and how ToM affects communications in all aspects of human-robot interaction. We further want to investigate the principal components that can contribute to this research direction. In particular, we aim to define and explore the needed level of shared mental models between people and robots for effectively planning, navigating, manipulating objects and the environment, and transparently communicating. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to): Theory of Mind in HRI Cognitive robotics Mental models in HRI Robot etiquette Explainable AI in HRI Cooperation and collaboration in human-robot teams Detection and understanding of human activity Monitoring of behaviour and internal states of humans Motion planning and navigation in human-centred environments Multi-modal situation awareness and spatial cognition Social intelligence for robots in interactive and non-interactive tasks PDF Submissions will be possible via https://ras.papercept.net/ using the special session category and code 'g19y9'. Accepted papers will be included in the conference proceedings and submissions should follow the guidelines for regular paper submissions (https://www.ro-man2025.org/contributing/regularpaper), i.e. 6 (+2 paid extra) pages in the required IEEE US Letter format. Authors will have to declare that the research presented in the submitted papers complies with the IEEE Code of Ethics. *Read more at https://www.ro-man2025.org/paper-submission-qa.*

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IEEE-RAS TC on RoboCup Call for Student Representatives
by Raymond Sheh 13 Mar '25

13 Mar '25

Hi All! The IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (IEEE-RAS) Technical Committee on RoboCup is looking for a Student Representative volunteer! In summary, we're looking for a Ph.D. or M.S. research student who is active in RoboCup (as a team and/or committee member), is an IEEE-RAS student member, and would like to help us to further collaboration between RoboCup and the IEEE-RAS, particularly when it comes to student activities. Applications close March 25th. Please see https://robocup.org/news/178 for details. Cheers! - Raymond Sheh On behalf of the Co-Chairs of the IEEE-RAS TC on RoboCup -- https://raymondsheh.org

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Help us share your RoboCup News on Social Media!
by Maike Paetzel-Prüsmann 02 Mar '25

02 Mar '25

Dear RoboCuppers, One of the initiatives of the RoboCup Federation for 2025 is to expand our presence on social media. We aim to inform the general public about robotics and AI research and strengthen our connections with the broader scientific community beyond RoboCup. And of course, we would also like to help your team and league to expand their reach. To make this happen, we need your help! We want to showcase what's happening in the RoboCup community. Has your team recently published a paper? Did you organize a scientific workshop related to RoboCup? Has a local newspaper featured your team? We're always looking for great RoboCup-related content to share on our social media channels! Here are two easy ways to submit your content: (1) Fill out this form: https://cloud.robocup.org/apps/forms/s/HM6eDxTS8sWzktSRayANt34x (2) Use the #post-suggestions channel on the RoboCup Federation Discord server. You can suggest posts you've already shared on your own channels (in case we missed them) or submit ideas for original content. You don't need to write a full post yourself — just a few key details are enough. And if you have a picture to go with it, even better! You can upload images via Discord or in the form linked above. Thank you for helping us spread the word about RoboCup! Cheers Maike (for the RoboCup Federation)

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