Call for Papers

It’s been 11 years since Satoshi Nakamoto unleashed the first blockchain, the Bitcoin, into our lives. Since then, the theoretical and experimental foundations of blockchain systems are becoming increasingly well understood and today the term "blockchain" is not anymore a buzzword. And the the combination of such a ground-breaking technology with robotics, seems to be very promising since it would allow the robotic applications be more secure, flexible, autonomous, and even profitable.

Robotics is an interdisciplinary research area at the interface of computer science and engineering. Robotics involves design, construction, operation, and use of robots. The goal of robotics is to design intelligent machines that can help and assist humans in their day-to-day lives and keep everyone safe. 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. 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 immutable shared data structure, thanks to the distributed consensus protocols and cryptographic techniques, that can store various kinds of data including program codes (known as smart contracts) that can be deterministically executed the same way by all the participants. Thanks to its characteristics that fit very well the multi-agent systems, blockchain technologies show great potential for making robotic applications more open, trustworthy, secure and tolerant to faults.

Based on this observation, the BCT4ROS workshop series seek to move beyond the classical view of robotic systems to advance our comprehension about the conceivable outcomes and impediments of combining robots with blockchain innovation and intend to bring together specialists active in the scholarly community and industry to share tthe thoughts so far created and talk about the challenges still ahead.. We welcome all papers that address and evaluate the relevance of blockchain technologies to overcome the limitations of robotic systems.

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 2020 template (download the template from here: LaTeX or MS-Word) and should be submitted using the EasyChair conference management system.

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

Program

The workshop is planned to be an on-line half day event. The schedule is as follows:

Program Committee

Aleksandr Kapitonov, ITMO University, St.Petersburg, Russian Federation
Andrea Omicini, University of Bologna, Italy
Eduardo Castelló Ferrer, MIT, USA
Enis Karaaslan, Muğla Sıtkı Koçman Üniversitesi, Turkey
Davide Calvaresi, University of Applied Science Western Switzerland, Switzerland
Joao Sequeira, Institue for Systems and Robotics, Portugal
Marco Dorigo, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
Nicholas Jäger, OTH Amberg-Weiden, Germany
Olivier Boissier, Ecole des Mines de Saint-Etienne, France
Öznur Özkasap, Koç University, Turkey
Pierre-Yves Piriou, EDF R&D, France
Sérgio Guerreiro, University of Lisbon, Portugal

Organizing Committee

Önder Gürcan, CEA LIST, Paris, France
Fabio Bonsignorio, Heron Robots, Genova, Italy

Publication / Proceedings

All accepted submissions will be invited

• to a special issue in MDPI's Robotics (indexed in the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI - Web of Science) , Scopus (2019 CiteScore: 2.5), nspec (IET) and DBLP Computer Science Bibliography).


• to a post-proceedings book by Springer's Studies in Systems, Decision and Control series. (indexed in ISI, SCOPUS, DBLP, Ulrichs, MathSciNet, Current Mathematical Publications, Mathematical Reviews, Zentralblatt Math: MetaPress and Springerlink),

Workshop Venue

BCT4ROS'2020 will be held in conjunction with The 29th IEEE International (Virtual) Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN 2020) as a virtual conference (Zoom meeting) on the 15th of September.

Topic: BCT4ROS 2020
Time: Sep 15, 2020 08:30 AM Rome
Join Zoom Meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81754971938?pwd=YWx0RzBvL2tmOXdYU0RKRUk1UzlmQT09
Meeting ID: 817 5497 1938
Passcode: 469469

Registration

Contact

Previous Editions

Acknowledgement