IEEE International Conference

 

Novel robotics applications driven by research, industry and society call for the development of systems of ever increasing complexity: systems with sliding autonomy; humanoid robots; distributed robots; mobile sensor networks, and so on. But unfortunately, steady improvements in robot hardware have not been matched by corresponding advancements in robot software. Besides fundamental open problems still waiting for sound answers, the development of new robotics applications still suffers from the lack of widely used tools, libraries, and algorithms ready to be incorporated into new projects. Simulation environments are playing a main role in reducing development time and cost of large scale systems. But their use is still regarded by many with skepticism. Seamless migration of code from general purpose simulators to real world systems is still a rare circumstance, due to the complexity of robot, world, sensors, and actuators modeling.

These challenges drive the quest for next generation of methodologies and tools for robot development. The objective of the International Conference on Simulation, Modeling, and Programming for Autonomous Robots (SIMPAR) is to offer a unique forum for these topics and to bring together researchers from academia and industry to identify and solve the key issues necessary to ease the development of increasingly complex robot software, and to boost a smooth shifting of results from simulated to real applications.