Call for contributions

There will be stands available in the workshop room for a limited number of posters.
Prospective participants are required to submit an extended abstract (maximum 2 pages in length), optionally accompanied by a small video.
Late-breaking results are encouraged.
Submissions must be in pdf, following the IEEE conference style (two-columns).
Please check the IEEE RAS Manuscript Preparation Guidelines before submitting your manuscript:
http://ras.papercept.net/conferences/support/support.php
Send your pdf manuscript (and optionally a small video) to ljamone@isr.ist.utl.pt, indicating [IROS 2015 Workshop] in the subject.
All submissions will be carefully reviewed by the workshop organizers, for relevance to the topic of the workshop, as well as scientific merit.
The selected contributions will be presented during the workshop as posters, in particular during the coffee breaks (30 minutes each) and lunch break (90 minutes).
Moreover, we are considering to propose a Special Issue to the IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development, in which extended versions of the submitted manuscripts (about 8-10 pages) will be included.

The submission may include 1 question to the invited speakers (and/or to the workshop audience in general) and 1 answer/comment to one of the following questions:

- What are the pre-requisites for functional (human and robotic) tool use?
- What are affordances useful for in robotics?
- What are the main challenges to apply AI planning techniques to real robotic task in unstructured environments?
- How would you define affordances, without using one of the "classical" definitions?
- Learning high-level abstract concept building up from low-level sensorimotor mappings? Drive sensorimotor learning using top-down information from abstract concepts and the relationships among them? How to combine the two information flows? Is that necessary/helpful?
- What would a service robot need more? Order the following for their importance and/or difficulty-to-achieve: a) sensorimotor prediction capabilities at the level of rats, b) distributed force/tactile sensing and compliant control, c) cognitive speech at a "Siri" level, d) appealing design, e) SLAM and navigation/locomotion, f) non-verbal communication, g) high definition RGB-D vision, h) high-level declarative knowledge at a "Google-search" level, i) procedural knowledge and adaptation skills of an average lizard. 
- Why did Hubo win the DARPA Robotic Challenge? Is it a milestone for cognitive robotics (and why yes or not)?

Upon available time, (some of) those questions/answers will be used to "drive" a final discussion.


Important dates:
    July 31, 2015: Extended abstracts submission deadline
    August 17, 2015: Notification of acceptance
    September 28, 2015: Workshop