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This full-day workshop aims at providing a state of the art overview on the recent researches and achievements in Human-Robot Interac- tions (HRI), as well as stimulating a fruitful and attractive discussion on the major challenges to be solved in future robot applications. The basic questions that the workshop will try to answer are: What are the major advances achieved in the last years related to HRI? What are the major challenges in HRI for future robots applications? Due to the nature of the intrinsic problems posed by HRI, the workshop will see the participation of an interdisciplinary group of experts not only in robotics, but also in cognitive sciences, neurosciences, linguists, de- sign, human factors, sociology, psychology, ethics and also art. The workshop will consist of invited presentations given by keynote speak- ers in the eld of HRI and related areas and a restricted number of presentations selected among the best contributions received as pa- pers. A round table discussion will conclude the workshop to identify scientic and technological challenges in HRI that will enable appli- cations of robots in real domains.

As robots and autonomous systems move away from laboratory setups towards complex real-world scenarios, both the perception ca- pabilities of these systems and their abilities to acquire and model semantic information must become more powerful. For example, a general-purpose service robot collaborating with a human user needs to know human spatial concepts and have an understanding of 3- dimensional objects, their use and functional relationships between them. More generally, semantic perception and mapping must become a resource for the robot, which links sensory information to the robots knowledge base and high-level deliberative components. A key issue is a robots ability to autonomously acquire information and extract semantic models from it, as well as exploration strategies to decide where and how to acquire the most relevant information pertinent to a specic semantic model. In this full-day workshop we will try to analyze the requirements of such a system, and discuss alternatives for achieving this goal, by bringing together researchers from areas such as Computer Vision, Cognitive Robotics, 3D Mapping, Mobile Manipulation, Machine Learning, Knowledge Representation, and Ex- ploration. This is the second workshop at ICRA to discuss currently running projects and recent results to advance the state-of-the-art in semantic perception, mapping, and exploration.

As satellites and spacecraft near the end of their expected lifetime, many begin to incur failures in key components, expend their attitude control fuel, or reach computer obsolescence. Moreover, many satel- lites suer post-launch mishaps, including failed deployment of solar arrays and antennae and electronic failures of critical components that lead to mission failure. A free- ying spacecraft with an integral robotic front-end capable of reaching satellites in geosynchronous orbit would provide a valuable asset in addressing these failures. Satellite servic- ing could take advantage of recent advances in mobile manipulation in order to dock or berth to the target vehicle. After the servicer is docked, the robot can perform servicing tasks with a manipulator or make necessary repairs in-situ. For example, the servicer would be able to perform visual inspection, replace failed components, deploy stuck solar arrays, refuel tanks with liquid propellant, and perform many other maintenance tasks to support a single satellite or a constella- tion of satellites. The proposed full-day workshop will bring together international researchers in the elds of space and servicing robotics to exchange ideas in key enabling technology areas: manipulation, contact dynamics, pose estimation, teleoperation and haptics, shared autonomy, compliant control, multi-manipulator systems, time-delay compensation, and interactions in a space environment.

This full-day workshop intends to investigate the relationships be- tween the world of performance art, including theatre and dance, and that of robotic technologies, focusing on their reciprocal in uences and how such in uences can benets both elds. The workshop will be highly interdisciplinary, bringing together well-known roboticists active in the artworld, artists, and robotics companies operating in the art and entertainment elds, in order to exchange ideas, practices and experiences on the key scientic, technological and artistic as- pects. Among the topics that will be explored during the workshop is how the interaction between robotics and theatre can lead to the generation of new artform, impact innovation and creativity in both the engineering and artistic elds, and provide new possibilities for the emergence of new markets. The workshop will be divided into three main sessions. 1. Oral session: consisting of invited talks and selected contribu- tions from call of paper. 2. Video/live performance session: participants are invited to present videos or short live performances that document the reciprocal in uences between robotics and art. 3. Round table: a highly interactive discussion among the workshop participants and the audience.

For several applications like surveillance, search and rescue in dis- aster regions, and exploration, the use of a single or a of group of mobile robots is getting more and more common. Nevertheless, when the tasks become extremely complex and high-level cognitive-based decisions are required online (as, e.g., during exploration of very clut- tered, dynamic and unpredictable environments for search and rescue applications), complete autonomy is still far from being reached and humans intervention/assistance is necessary. In this context, haptic teleoperation systems, where a human operator commands a remote robot through a local interface and receive an informative haptic feed- back, allow to exploit humans intelligence to solve tasks too complex for nowadays robots. This full day workshop will focus on the haptic teleoperation of a single or a team of mobile robots. Its main goal is to present recent results in the eld and to establish a discussion on the technological, mathematical and psychophysical aspects of this problem.

The SDIR workshop series is a forum where researchers and prac- titioners share best practices, identify strategic research directions, and plan joint initiatives in robot software development. The specic topic of this workshop is \Programming Languages in Robotics." The full-day workshop is structured in three sessions.

1. Presentation Session: (morning) will include a keynote presen- tation by an invited expert and a set of talks that represent a selected set of accepted papers.
2. Poster Session: (afternoon one hour) will give the opportunity for all authors of accepted papers to discuss/demonstrate their work.
3. Group Discussion Session: (afternoon) will be organized as a working group session that maximizes participation from indi- viduals: we will start o with an initial list of questions followed by a solicitation from participants. Then, the organizers will break up the group into splinter groups that will discuss each of the questions and report back to the larger group.

Signicant advances in software development environments and cost reductions of vehicle and sensor platforms have resulted in tremen- dous growth of R&D for many-robot systems and distributed sensor networks worldwide. These eorts have yielded a plethora of theo- retical results and online videos of many-robot systems achieving re- markable feats, but few of these systems are nding their way into the real world beyond prototype demonstrations. This full-day work- shop will bring together experts in many-robot systems (including multi-robot teams, swarms, mobile sensor and communication net- works, other networked mobile robots) to investigate the gap between theory (including research prototyping and demonstrations) and real world applications of many-robot systems. We will seek to identify killer apps along with key technical issues hampering the deployment of many robot systems, and discuss solutions towards moving these systems out of the laboratories and into real-world application envi- ronments. We refer to this process as \Crossing the Reality Gap". We solicit submissions of extended abstracts from researchers working on crossing the reality gap for many-robot systems. The workshop will feature a combination of invited talks, oral and poster presentations, and a panel discussion on the topic \What government organizations need from researchers to transition many-robot systems to operational use.

Following the rst successful workshop at the 2011 ICRA, we would like to extend the Bio-Bots workshop for the 2012 ICRA with a re- newed scope. Our shared view in this workshop is that breakthroughs in bio-articial muscles, biosensors, and synthetic biology are pro- viding components usable for building biological robots. Bacteria- propelled micro-nano robots have already been built, having signi- cant impacts upon medicine and biology. Technologies for culturing cells and tissues to produce novel sensors, actuators, and processors have also been developed, which can be integrated into micro-nano robots for advanced applications. The boundary between biology and robotics is being fused in this emerging eld. The objective of this workshop is to display the state-of-the-art of Bio-Bots, discuss key technologies and challenges, and address system-level issues, applica- tions, and opportunities. We will also address educational issues: how we can best educate students who will work in the eld where en- gineering and biology are seamlessly integrated. Nine speakers from the robotics community have already been conrmed. A few more speakers from synthetic biology and tissue engineering will be invited to promote cross-disciplinary communications.

In emerging robotic applications, in which robots need to coop- erate closely with humans, traditional rigid structures and sti ac- tuation systems should be properly modeled and controlled in order to achieve adaptability, compliancy and safety. An alternative design approach is to build actuators with physically adjustable compliance and damping, able to store and release mechanical energy, to react softly when touching the environment, and intrinsically safe, just like human muscles do. Robots and biomechatronic systems can be given similar capabilities as humans by implementing variable impedance actuators, characterized by the property that their apparent output stiness, and thus the stiness of the actuated joint, can be changed independently from the actuator output position. Variable impedance actuators realize robust, energy-ecient and highly dynamic systems, which permit the embodiment of natural characteristics, found in bi- ological systems, and implementable into a new generation of robots. This full-day workshop covers the challenges related to the technolog- ical realization and the functionalities of such actuation systems, in terms of both mechanical design and control, by mostly focusing on complex robotic and biomechatronic applications, such as robotic ma- nipulation, bipedal and multi-legged locomotion, prosthetics (hands, arms and legs), rehabilitation devices and social robots (humanoids).

This all-day tutorial introduces the audience to reinforcement learning. Prior experience in this area is not assumed. In the first half of this tutorial we will cover the foundations of reinforcement learning: Markov decision processes, value iteration, policy iteration, linear programming for solving an MDP, function approximation, model-free versus model-based learning, Q-learning, TD-learning, policy search, the likelihood ratio policy gradient, the policy gradient theorem, actor-critic, natural gradient and importance sampling. In the second half of this tutorial we will discuss example success stories and open problems.