Call for Papers

From science fiction to the university laboratories, and now to the real world, robotics and blockchains are not just buzzwords anymore but are emerging technologies – the expected market potential is in the tens of billions of dollars in the next ten years.

Robotics is the branch of technology that deals with the design, construction, operation and application of robots and computer systems for their control, sensory feedback, and information processing. It is a broad and diverse field related to many commercial industries and consumer uses. Robots have come to play a widespread and crucial role in many applications today: industrial robots, military robots, medical robots, cobots, swarm robots, autonomous drones and so on. However, it is quite challenging to perform research and development in enabling and fostering the development of autonomous robots and to help such robots become accepted by society. In order to enable the development of robots that can operate autonomously and safely, important issues like data privacy, security and transparency need to be tackled for the future use of robots in high-sensitive scenarios. Therefore, solutions to these issues might be necessary steps towards mainstream adoption.

Blockchain technologies provide an incorruptible shared data structure that can be programmed to record any kind of data and calculations (e.g., measurement of real effects, operating conditions, reference situation) in a multi-agent/multi-robot environment. More specifically, blockchains guarantee that the recorded data is immutable, thanks to cryptographic techniques, and highly replicated thanks to distributed consensus protocols. Together with smart contracts, transactional protocols between agents stored in the blockchain, blockchain technologies show great potential to make robotic applications more open, trustworthy, secure and tolerant to faults.

Based on this observation, the BCT4ROS workshop seeks to move beyond the classical view of robotic systems to advance our understanding about the possibilities and limitations of combining robots with blockchain technology and aims to gather researchers active in academia and industry to share the ideas so far developed and discuss the challenges still ahead. We welcome papers that address and evaluate the relevance of blockchain technologies to overcome the limitations of robotic systems.

Relevant Topics include (but are not limited to) the following:

Submissions

All papers must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference. The following paper categories are welcome:

• Full papers (6 to 8 pages) should (1) clearly describe innovative and original research, or (2) report a survey on a research topic in the field, or (3) explain how existing techniques have been applied to a real-world case.
• Short papers (up to 4 pages) should describe novel and promising ideas and/or techniques that are in an early stage of development.
• Extended abstracts (up to 300 words) should introduce novel and promising ideas shortly and concisely.

Papers should be prepared using the standard IEEE Ro-MAN 2019 template (download the template from here: LaTeX or MS-Word) and should be submitted using the EasyChair conference management system.

Proceedings

BCT4ROS is a non-archival workshop, meaning accepted papers will not appear in formal proceedings or be published online. As a result, submissions to BCT4ROS may still be eligible for subsequent publication at other conferences or journals. However, authors are strongly advised to review the submission policies of their target venues (conferences or journals) to confirm whether prior workshop participation or non-archival status conflicts with their guidelines. We recommend completing this step before submitting to BCT4ROS to avoid potential issues.

Program

The workshop is planned to be a half day event on 17 October 2019 Thursday. The tentative schedule is as follows:

Program Committee

Aleksandr Kapitonov, ITMO University, St.Petersburg, Russian Federation
Andrea Omicini, University of Bologna, Italy
Davide Calvaresi, University of Applied Science Western Switzerland, Switzerland
Eduardo Castelló Ferrer, MIT, USA
Fabio Bonsignorio, Heron Robots, Genova, Italy
Jason A. Tran, University of Southern California, USA
Marco Dorigo, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
Michael Ignaz Schumacher, University of Applied Science Western Switzerland, Switzerland
Nicholas Jäger, OTH Amberg-Weiden, Germany
Olivier Boissier, Ecole des Mines de Saint-Etienne, France
Önder Gürcan, CEA LIST, Paris, France
Öznur Özkasap, Koç University, Turkey
Sooyong Park, Sogang University, South Korea

Organizers

Önder Gürcan, CEA LIST, Paris, France
Fabio Bonsignorio, Heron Robots, Genova, Italy
Eduardo Castelló Ferrer, MIT, USA

Venue

The conference will be held in conjunction with The 28th IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN 2019) at Le Meridien, Windsor Place in New Delhi, India on the 17th of October.

Registration

Registration can be done through the web site of the hosting conference IEEE ROMAN 2019 via this link.

Note that, it is both possible to register to the whole conference or only for Workshops/Tutorials. When you entered to the registration web site, a pop up message guide will guide you about registering only for Workshops/Tutorials.

Contact

For contacting with the organizers, please use the following e-mail address: bct4ros2019@icloud.com