Title: Soft Robotics Organizer: Professor Peter Xu, the University of Auckland, New Zealand Abstract: This session will present some recent advance in soft robotics including design, modeling, fabrication, sensing, actuation and control. A number of unique applications will also be demonstrated.

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Title: Knowledge Representation for Robotics and Automation Organizer: Craig Schlenoff, National Institute of Standards and Technology, USA URL: http://www.nist.gov/el/isd/ks/schlenoff.cfm Abstract: One of the basic requirements for any type of robot communication (regardless if with other robots or humans) is the need for a common vocabulary with clear and concise definitions. With the growing complexity of behaviors that robots are expected to perform as well as the rise of multi-robot and human–robot collaboration, the need for a well-defined knowledge representation is becoming evident. The existence of such a standard knowledge representation would:    1) Precisely define concepts and relations in the robot’s knowledge representation,    2) Ensure common understanding among members of the community and    3) Facilitate efficient data integration and transfer of information among robotic systems. This special session will have papers and presentations from areas such as knowledge representations for industrial robots, service robots, unmanned aerial vehicles, autonomous underwater vehicles, and others. All of them are will address knowledge representation and reasoning challenges. Part of the focus of this special session will be on the IEEE-RAS Working Group entitled “Ontologies for Robotics and Automation” (IEEE WG ORA). This group aims to develop a standard ontology and associated methodology for knowledge representation and reasoning in robotics and automation. This standard will provide a unified way for representing knowledge allowing for unambiguous knowledge transfer among any group of humans, robots, and other artificial systems. The working group has more than 150 members from different countries around the globe. Topics of interest include:    - Standards for robotics and automation    - Ontology development for robotics and automation    - Knowledge representation for robotics and automation    - Reasoning techniques for robotics and automation ontologies    - Activity recognition    - Knowledge enabled control of robots    - Industrial automation using ontologies    - Robot-robot collaboration using ontologies    - Human-robot collaboration using ontologies    - Human-robot intention recognition    - Knowledge representation and reasoning in ubiquitous environments.

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Title: Underwater Robots & Applications Organizer: Dr. Hyun-Taek Choi, Korea Institute of Ocean Science & Technology, Korea Abstract: Recently, an underwater robotic vehicle market known as conservative has been changed toward reducing operating cost. Since the major portion of operating cost is large supporting facilities and well-trained personnel’s, robotic intelligence plays very important roles for highly demanding market-driven needs just like ground robots and aerial robots. Unfortunately, underwater environment is too tough to be able to make our expectation true, which could be barriers to people who want to get into new fused research area. Nevertheless, many researchers have been working for algorithms pursuing a real unmanned underwater robot, they have been announcing many results on various topics including robot vision, sound source localization, intelligent localization and navigation, probability based filtering, 3D path planning, middleware, optimal design & implementation and so on. In this session, we’d like to share common objectives regarding intelligent underwater robots and to try to give you new chances to pick up fresh idea from various background people.

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Title: Flapping-Wing Air Vehicles - Construction, Control, and Validation Organizer: Dr. Sanjay Boddhu, Wright State University, USA Abstract: Flapping-Wing Air Vehicles present significant challenges in construction, control, modeling, and validation. In this special session, we will address each of these topics via a combination of invited and submitted papers. Of special interest are papers that address construction and control of actual (not simulated) vehicles and papers that attempt to advance the art of controller adaptation and performance verification in actual operational environments while conducting normal missions.