2014 ICRA Workshop On the Centrality of Decentralization in Multi-robot Systems: Holy Grail or False Idol?

I am the main organizer of the ICRA 2014 Half-day Workshop On the Centrality of Decentralization in Multi-robot Systems: Holy Grail or False Idol?, an event of the 2014 IEEE International Conference of Robotics and Automation, Hong Kong, China.

More information at the workshop website.


On the Centrality of Decentralization in Multi-robot Systems: Holy Grail or False Idol? 

Half-day ICRA Workshop

Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center, Hong Kong, China, Sunday, June 1st, 2014, 2pm6pm, Room: S426

Motivations and Objectives

From multi-robot decentralized theory to practice: after more than a decade of theoretical studies and advancements on decentralized estimation and control for multi-robot systems and distributed algorithms for networks of robotic agents, several real-world experiments have been carried out and the gap between theory and practice is becoming small. 
But is decentralization a real benefit for teams of multi-robots, or is it more a pure theoretical challenge? What of the various decentralized features have found a practical relevance? In robotics and distributed control, decentralization is typically achieved at the cost of local optimality and slow convergence rates, while Nature shows several examples of efficient and highly dynamic behaviors of large scale animal populations. Is this evident gap due to a methodological and insufficiency of our theoretical tools or to a technological lack, i.e., in terms of perceptual and actuation performances? 
This workshop will host some of the most renowned researchers in the multi-robot field and will let them both present their most recent results and thoroughly discuss the aforementioned questions and their fundamental implications in future multi-robot research.

List of topics

This workshop is supported by the IEEE RAS Networked Robots Technical Committee.

The workshop topics cover, but are not limited to:

- multi-robot/multi-agent systems

- distributed algorithms

- swarm robotics

- mobile sensor networks

- mobile communication/ad-hoc networks

- heterogeneous multi-robot platforms

- decentralization vs. centralization

- scalability vs. performance and reliability

- decentralization vs. efficiency