In the field, we throw robots into the wild to achieve what seems a simple task, that quickly ends up being arduous. As experts, we continuously loop through designing, developing, deploying, and analyzing our autonomous systems until it meets some level of success. From marine to forestry, from mining to agriculture, no matter the various applications, field robotics is an ambitious area of work. The standards of success are rising, given the advancements in robot designs and algorithmic frameworks, but so too are new challenges arising, limiting the advancement of field robotics. This workshop brings together experts and new enthusiasts from various subdomains of field robotics — such as marine, aerial, legged, agriculture, search-and rescue-robotics — to showcase not only the achievements in state-of-the-art field robotics, but more importantly the respective open challenges.
Open questions — spanning from perception and state estimation to control, planning, and multi-robot coordination — for each subdomain that the workshop will explore include: What are established successes? What are the common and unique challenges? Why existing systems and algorithms are not working? What are possible solutions? Can solutions to these challenges generalize to other subdomains? What problems should we focus more on? The vision is to create shared perspectives from the various subdomains that will foster the identification of shared challenges and cross-domain solutions, encourage networking, exchange of experiences, project inspirations, and new collaborations, towards building robust robots in the wild.
