AREA 2024

Autonomous agents is a well-established area that has been researched for decades, both from a design and implementation viewpoint. Nonetheless, the application of agents in real-world scenarios has largely been adopted in applications which are primarily software based, and remains limited in applications which involve physical interaction. In parallel, robots are no longer used only in tightly constrained industrial applications but are instead being applied in an increasing number of domains, ranging from robotic assistants to search and rescue, where the working environment is both dynamic and underspecified, and may involve interactions between multiple robots and humans. This presents significant challenges to traditional software engineering methodologies. Increased autonomy is an important route to enabling robotic applications to function in these environments, and autonomous agents and multi-agent systems are a promising approach to their engineering. As autonomy and interaction increases, the engineering of reliable behaviour becomes more challenging (both in robotic applications and in more traditional autonomous agent settings), and so there is a need for research into new approaches to verification and validation that can be integrated in the engineering lifecycle of these systems. This workshop aims to bring together researchers from the autonomous agents and the robotics communities, since combining knowledge from these two research areas may lead to innovative approaches that solve complex problems related to the verification and validation of autonomous robotic systems. Therefore, we encourage submissions that combine agents, robots, software engineering, and verification, but we also welcome papers focused on one of these areas, as long as their applicability to the other areas is explicit.