Future autonomous systems need to work in teams and communicate with humans and other robots such as unmanned vehicles to share information and coordinate activities. In particular, there is an increasing demand from government agencies and the private sector alike to use Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs), Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs), and Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) for tasks including homeland security, reconnaissance, search and rescue, surveillance, data collection, and urban planning. A standard ontology in Autonomous Robotics is the right tool that provides the underlying semantics of the vocabulary employed in communications and interactions between heterogeneous autonomous systems. 

The workshop will provide thus the opportunity for the AuR members and other participants to evaluate the work done so far and to further share knowledge about the different R&A domains (e.g. aerial, ground, surface, underwater, and space robots) in order to identify new concepts and axioms as well as to define appropriate relations between these concepts and their properties to facilitate interactions between humans and autonomous robots.

The advances of Robotics Systems around the globe show a very promising future where robots and humans will share the same environment as partners. Robots might work in factories, malls, and airports. In all cases, both human and robot should communicate to each other to exchange information. An effective way of achieving this goal is to standardize terminology in the Robotics and Automation (R&A) domain, as it has been done in the past in other domains. We propose to discuss current work towards a standard for autonomous robots that specifies domain concepts and relationships as ontology. The proposed workshop will serve the following sectors: Public sector using autonomous robots to deliver automated services, such as police and emergency responders; Health service providers; Transformation industry; Mining and construction industry; Oil and gas industry.

As such the organizers expect a broad spectrum of participants, both from academia and industry, interested in advancing the interaction between robots and humans using a standardized and formal terminology. Amongst them, the members of the IEEE-RAS Autonomous Robotics (AuR) study group.