Charles Fox - Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems: 22nd Annual Conference, TAROS 2021, Lincoln, UK, September 8–10, 2021, Proceedings

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TAROS is the longest-running UK-hosted international conference on Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS), which is aimed at the presentation and discussion of the latest results and methods in autonomous robotics research and applications. TAROS offers a friendly environment for robotics researchers and industry to take stock and plan future progress. It welcomes senior researchers and research students alike and specifically provides opportunities for research students and young research scientists to present their work to the scientific community.

TAROS 2021 received 66 submitted papers, of which 45 were accepted (a 68 per cent acceptance rate) with 19 presented orally and 26 as posters. The number of submissions was lower than for a usual TAROS due to submissions taking place during the COVID-19 pandemic. Each paper was single-blind reviewed by at least three Program Committee members and scored from -3 to +3. TAROS is a UK-based conference but the Program Committee contained international members. TAROS aims to present the state of the art in the UK robotics community and to bring this community together so the Organizing Committee decided to retain a larger conference via a higher acceptance rate rather than reduce the size of the conference, so acceptances were made algorithmically for papers with threshold mean scores of 0 or more.

The main conference spanned two days. The first day focussed on algorithms and computer science, with sessions on reinforcement learning, perception, and co-operation. The second day focussed on systems, hardware and mechatronics, with sessions on robot design, sensing, and actuation. Linking to these themes, the keynotes talks were Towards Personal Assistive Robots by Yannis Demeris (Imperial College London), An Uncertain Mission: Decision Making for Autonomous Robots by Nick Hawes (University of Oxford), which was made public and sponsored by the IET, and Ant-inspired Robots by Barbara Webb (University of Edinburgh). As is traditional, TAROS 2021 featured an extended presentation of the best paper from the UKRAS conference, which is included as Predicting Artist Drawing Activity via Multi-camera Inputs for Co-creative Drawing by Chipp Jansen and Elizabeth Sklar. The conference took place remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic and was hosted virtually by the University of Lincoln.