Call for Contribution:

Demonstrating high-speed autonomous racing can be considered as a grand challenge for self-driving cars, and making progress here has the potential to enable breakthroughs in agile and safe autonomy. To succeed at racing, an autonomous vehicle is required to perform both precise steering and throttle maneuvers in a physically-complex, uncertain environment, and by executing a series of high-frequency decisions. This makes racing an interesting opportunity to explore the physical and algorithmic limits of autonomous driving. Autonomous racing competitions, such as Autonomous Formula SAE, F1/10 autonomous racing, Roborace, and Indy Autonomous Challenge are, both figuratively and literally, getting a lot of traction and becoming proving grounds for testing perception, planning, and control algorithms at high speeds.

We are proposing this workshop to raise awareness of the overall autonomous racing area to the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society community that can take inspiration from the problem space in their own research. This workshop provides necessary information around this unique and important application space, that will require innovations across core topics in robotics and we believe it will gather a lot of interest.

Topics of Interest

  • Head-to-head multi-agent racing
  • Modeling vehicle dynamics at high-speeds
  • Overtaking strategies
  • State-estimation of opponents
  • Racing simulation at scale
  • Limits of perception, localization, and planning at high-speeds
  • Driving Behavior: Adversarial vs Cooperative
  • Balancing safe vs aggressive driving policies
  • Hardware-software co-design for autonomous racing
  • Hardware AI accelerators for perception
  • Software stack and architectures for racing

Call for Contribution:

We invite papers for submission to the workshop related to the topics descripted above and the theme of autonomous racing. Position papers, work in progress and novel but not necessarily thoroughly worked out ideas are encouraged. The submissions will be reviewed by the workshop’s program committee and will undergo a thorough review process and receive 2-3 high quality reviews. In addition, a best paper award will be presented in both categories. We offer two opportunities for paper submissions.

1. Workshop Paper: 4-6 pages, including references. The paper should be in PDF format and use the standard IEEE ICRA Conference template. Accepted paper will be made available on the website and the authors are invited to make an additionl oral (live) presentations, or a video highlight.

Paper Submission: Closed

2. Special Issue Journal Paper: Top papers from the workshop will be invited to extend their work for an upcoming Special Issue on Autonomous Racing in the Journal of Field Robotics. We expect those papers are journal quality and around 10-12 pages. The journal will be open access and a link with the call for paper + submission instructions can be found here

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Important Dates:

  • Submission site opens: January 1st, 2022
  • Submission deadline (Workshop Paper): April 22nd, 2022 [Anywhere on Earth (GMT -12)][Firm deadline, no extensions]
  • Notice of Acceptance (Workshop Paper): May 13th, 2022

Program Committee:

  • Niklas Kochdumper, Stony Brook University
  • Frederik Werner, TU Munich
  • Varundev Sukhil, University of Virginia
  • Jun Zeng, UC Berkeley
  • Micaela Verucchi, Univeristy of Modena and Reggio Emilia
  • Haoru Xue, Autoware Foundation
  • Nitish Gupta, University of Central Florida
  • Hongrui Zheng, University of Pennsylvania
  • Will Bryan, Auburn University
  • Jasmina Zubača, TU Graz
  • Yash Vardhan Pant, University of Waterloo
  • Rodolfo Valiente, University of Central Florida
  • Thomas Beckers, University of Pennsylvania
  • Luigi Berducci, TU Vienna