General Information

The field of off-road autonomy has been of great interest due to applications in various industries, such as agriculture, search and rescue, an d military operations. The dynamic and unpredictable nature of off-road environments poses unique challenges and opens avenues for all aspects of robotic research. The goal of this workshop is to engage experts and researchers in off-road autonomy, in a broad coverage of public datasets, benchmarks, software stacks, infrastructures, state estimation, semantic segmentation, traversability estimation, terrain analysis, planning, dynamics model, domain adaptation, and more.

This will be a full-day workshop. It will feature a mix of presentations, open panel discussions, and an invited poster session. There will be eight invited speakers and a keynote speaker to discuss their related research, thoughts, and experiences in various directions within off-road autonomy. The workshop aims to foster discussion, share insights, and encourage collaborations among experts from academia, industry, and research institutions, as well as to identify the key challenges and opportunities in the advancement of off-road autonomy technologies.

Sessions Overview

	Presenter	Session Title	Time
Welcome message by organizers & overview of workshop			8:45 - 9:00 AM
	Inwook Shim Assistant Professor Inha University	Learning Off-Road Terrain Traversability	9:00 - 9:20 AM
	Ji Zhang Systems Scientist CMU	From Lidar SLAM to Full-scale Autonomy and Beyond	9:20 - 9:40 AM
	Coffee Break		9:40-10:00 AM
	Amy Tabb Research PI USDA	Calibration of Multiple-Camera Imaging Systems	10:00-10:20 AM
	Xuesu Xiao Assistant Professor George Mason University	Learning Extreme Off-Road Mobility	10:20 - 10:40 AM
	Poster Oral Session A	Spotlight Talks	10:40 - 11:00 AM
	Poster session	Attendees can walk around to view presenters’ posters	11:00 AM - 12 PM
	Lunch		12:00 - 1:00 PM
	Sebastian Scherer Associate Research Professor, Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University	Self-supervised Costmap Learning for Off-road Vehicle Traversability	1:00-1:20 PM
	Maggie Wigness Senior Computer Scientist U.S. Army Research Laboratory	Human-Guided Machine Learning for Autonomous Navigation	1:20 - 1:40 PM
	Paulo Borges Principal Research Scientist CSIRO	Robots in the Woods: Challenges and Multimodal Alternatives	1:40-2:00 PM
	Coffee Break		2:00-2:20 PM
	Martial Hebert Dean, School of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University	Offroad Driving from 1984-2000	2:20-2:35 PM
	Panel	Panel Discussion	2:35-3:10 PM
	Marco Hutter Professor of Robotics ETH Zurich	Autonomous legged navigation: From structured to unstructured environments	3:10 - 3:30 PM
	Poster Oral Session B	Spotlight Talks	3:30-3:50 PM
	Ali Agha CEO Field AI	Resilient Robotic Autonomy Under Uncertainty	3:50-4:10 PM
	Poster session	Attendees can walk around to view presenters’ posters	4:10-4:45 PM
	Closing remarks	Workshop ends	4:45 - 5:00 PM

Call for Papers

Important dates (all times AoE)

Submissions open: Feb 1st 2024
Submission deadline: Apr 8th 2024
Decision notification: Apr 21th 2024
Camera-ready deadline: May 7th 2024
Workshop: May 17th 2024

Submission

Submission link: OpenReview.

In this workshop, we aim to bring together machine learning and robotics researchers who work at the intersection of these fields. Topics of interest include but are not limited to the following (all under the context of their roles in off-road autonomy):

Multi-modal perception
Self-supervised learning
Sim-to-real transfer
Online adaptation
Traversability estimation
Foundation models for navigation
Heterogeneous collaborative robots
Off-road driving dataset
Safe robot operation in uncertain and dynamic environments
Planning without prior knowledge of an environment
Approaches to off-road driving that work on multiple types of robots
Long-term localization and mapping in complex environments
Representations of terrain that model physical properties and robot-environment interaction

Accepted Talks and Posters

Accepted papers will be presented in the form of posters (with lightning talks) or spotlight talks at the workshop. We encourage submissions of work in progress, as well as work that is not yet published.

Submission instructions

Submissions should be short papers up to 4 pages in PDF format (not counting references and an optional appendix, which can go over the limit) This workshop will not provide formal official proceedings and the papers will be available on the workshop website.