Welcome to the site web of AIRO 2021, workshop of the 20th International Conference of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AI*IA 2021).
The goal of AIRO 2021 is to foster the discussion about the use of Artificial Intelligence methods to design intelligent robots.
AI principles and methods play a crucial role in several areas of Robotics research (e.g., field, service, social robotics, etc.) and are pervasively exploited at various levels of robot architectures. We argue that robot intelligence is a property arising from the interaction between robots and their environment. As we expect robots to leave lab settings and to take part to our everyday life, either at home or in public spaces, the notion of AI as a separated and somewhat peculiar functionality of a robotic architecture shows its intrinsic limitations.
On the contrary, the main motivation of AIRO 2021 is the belief that AI techniques must be considered at any levels of a robotic
architecture, with respect to both hardware and software components. Sensing, representation and action can greatly benefit from the adoption of various forms of AI.
The scientific relevance of the workshop is related to how diverse areas of AI research can be used to design robots able to face complex challenges in real-world tasks.
The scope of AIRO 2021 encompasses such diverse yet intertwined research areas as sensing and perception, human-robot interaction, intelligent control, cognition and adaptation, behaviour and reasoning models, knowledge representation and computational ontologies, but also robot engineering tools, real-time software architectures and fast-prototyping techniques. Starting from these fields, and in continuity with the previous AIRO workshops, we will explore how robot intelligence is expected to play major roles when robots interact with humans and when dealing with everyday not predictable situations, like human assistance, housekeeping or autonomous driving, just to name three of the most common trendy scenarios nowadays.
AIRO 2021 is part of an on-going effort to consolidate the Italian community working on various aspects of the intersection between AI and Robotics.
Keywords – Human-robot interaction, Cognitive and developmental Robotics, Software architectures, Knowledge representation, Reasoning, Planning, Machine learning, Sensing, Perception, Multi-Robot Systems and coordination.
Salvatore Anzalone – Université Paris 8, Saint Denis, France
Luca Buoncompagni – Universita’ degli Studi di Genova, Genova, Italy
Alberto Castellini – Universita’ di Verona, Verona, Italy
Alberto Finzi – University of Napoli “Federico II”, Naples, Italy