The 2018 Robotics: Science and Systems Conference will bring together researchers working on all aspects of robotics including scientific foundations, applications, and analysis of robotic systems. We seek your best work in all areas of robotics and solicit papers that cover both the “Science” and the “Systems” of robotics.

The conference will be single-track, and the final program will be the result of a thorough review process to give attendees an opportunity to see the most exciting research in all areas of robotics. Submissions will be evaluated in terms of their novelty, technical quality, significance, potential impact, and clarity. Selected papers will be invited for submission to special issues of the International Journal of Robotics Research and Autonomous Robots, and for expedited review as regular submissions to the IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

The program will include invited talks as well as oral and poster presentations of refereed papers. The three-day main session will be followed by two days of workshops and tutorials. Every effort is being made to keep the conference affordable, particularly for student attendees.

This year, we are especially excited to showcase the following two themes via special sessions at the conference:

Field Robotics: Underwater Robotics, Aerial/Space Robotics, Agricultural and Mining Robotics, Building and Construction, Environmental Monitoring, Autonomous Vehicles
Mechanisms and Design: Humanoids, Hands, Legged Systems, Snake Robots, Novel Actuators, Reconfigurable Robots, MEMS/NEMS, Micro/Nanobots, Novel Sensors, Haptics, Tactile Interfaces, Soft Robots, Wearable Robots, Design Optimization of Robotic Systems, Minimality in design
Important Dates
Full Paper Submission: Thursday, February 1, 2018, Anywhere on Earth
Paper Notification: April 23, 2018
Conference Dates: June 26-30, 2018 (Main Conference: June 26-28, Workshops: June 29-30), Pittsburgh, USA
Themes
RSS is actively seeking papers in areas that have not been traditionally represented at the conference and will stay true to its name covering both the “Science” and the “Systems” of robotics. Papers containing original and unpublished work are solicited in all areas of robotics, including (but not limited to) the following themes:

Kinematics, Dynamics, and Control: Dexterous Manipulation, Locomotion, Nonlinear Control, Visual Servoing
Mechanisms and Design: Humanoids, Hands, Legged Systems, Snake Robots, Novel Actuators, Reconfigurable Robots, MEMS/NEMS, Micro/Nanobots, Novel Sensors, Haptics, Tactile Interfaces, Soft Robots, Wearable Robots, Design Optimization of Robotic Systems, Minimality in design
Planning and Algorithms: Motion Planning, Task Planning, Complexity and Completeness, Computational Geometry, Simulation, Planning under Uncertainty
Manipulation: Contact Modeling, Grasp Synthesis, Assembly, Force Control, Manipulation Planning
Human-Robot Interaction and Human Centered Systems: Human Augmentation, Assistive Robots, Rehabilitation Robots, Social Robots, Safe Interaction, Robots and Art, Grounded Language Understanding, Natural Language Generation, Human-Robot Dialogue, Novel Interfaces, Proximate or Remote Human-Robot Teaming, Co-Robots, Intention Detection
Field Robotics: Underwater Robotics, Aerial/Space Robotics, Agricultural and Mining Robotics, Building and Construction, Environmental Monitoring, Autonomous Vehicles
Formal Methods: Safety, Verification, Validation, Correct-by-construction Systems, Controller Synthesis, Certification
Distributed Systems: Multi-Robot Systems, Networked Robots, Robot Soccer, Swarms, Coordination, Task and Resource Allocation
Medical Robotics: Robot-Assisted Procedures, Smart Surgical Tools, Rehabilitation / Wearable Robotics, Interventional Therapy, Image-Guided Procedures, Surgical Simulation, Soft-Tissue Modeling, Telesurgery
Biological Robotics: Biomimetic Robotics, Robotic Investigation of Biological Science and Systems, Neurobotics, Prosthetics, Robotics and Molecular Biology
Robot Perception: Vision, Tactile and Force Perception, Range Sensing, Inertial and Proprioceptive Sensing, Sensor Fusion, Calibration & Identification
Mobile Systems and Mobility: Mapping, Localization, Navigation, SLAM, Collision Avoidance, Exploration
Learning and Estimation for Robotic Systems: Reinforcement Learning, Bayesian Techniques, Deep Learning, Graphical Models, Imitation Learning, Programming by Demonstration, Diagnostics
Author Information
Submissions may be up to 8 pages in length, excluding references. The review process is double-blind: authors should not be listed on the title page, and reasonable anonymity should be maintained in the paper. The conference’s dual submission policy establishes that submissions that are identical (or substantially similar) to papers that have been previously published, or accepted for publication, or that have been submitted in parallel to other conferences are not appropriate for RSS; Exceptions to this rule are detailed on the author instructions page on the RSS 2018 website.

Submissions will be evaluated in terms of their technical quality, novelty, significance, potential impact, and clarity. All papers accepted for presentation at the main conference will be published in the online proceedings. Selected papers will be invited for submission to special issues of the International Journal of Robotics Research and Autonomous Robots, and for expedited review as regular submissions to the IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

Please visit the author instructions page for further details.