OCAR-ICRA 2022 : 2nd Workshop on Opportunities and Challenges with Autonomous Racing

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 is a good time for such a workshop 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.

Submission Guidelines:
We invite papers (4-6 pages, including references) 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 we will accept papers for oral (live) presentations, or a video highlight. A best paper award will be presented in both categories. We are currently exploring the possibility of a journal special issue in the Journal of Field Robotics for the best contributions at the workshop. Each paper will undergo a thorough review process and receive two high quality reviews. Accepted paper will be made available on the website. The paper should be in PDF format and use the standard IEEE ICRA Conference template.

List of Topics:
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