The Workshop on Advances in Robotics and Cognitive Systems provides an interdisciplinary forum for researchers and developers to present and discuss experiences, ideas, and research results regarding robotics and cognitive systems. 

In the recent years, these research fields have produced innovations and improvements that have a great impact in nowadays society and the next future life. 

The new generation of robots and cognitive systems is aimed at exhibiting complex and sophisticated understanding capabilities, as well as human-like processes and functionalities. They can learn and reason with neuromorphic problem-solving features, interactively engaging with human beings in a natural and personalized way, by integrating emotional and social issues. 

The workshop focuses on two strictly related research areas: i) robotics and artificial intelligence systems; ii) adaptive and human-like cognitive systems.The research area of “robotics and artificial intelligence systems” studies methodologies, algorithms and techniques for the integration of basic cognitive aspects (understanding, learning, decision making, and communicating) with emotional and social ones.

The consideration of motivations, moods, creativity, and introspective capabilities could enable sophisticated and natural social interactions. Both autonomous software systems and humanoid robotic platforms can be able to recognize, interpret and simulate the human emotional and social behavior in real and virtual environments. Natural language processing, text analysis methodologies, affective computing, and machine learning approaches can be applied to accomplish this goal, The research area of “adaptive and human-like cognitive systems” studies methodologies, algorithms and techniques for the automatic learning and human-like reasoning. Moreover, a cognitive system also aims at recognizing human activities and behaviors in particular contexts, trying to autonomously adapt itself in response to external dynamics. The research in this area is oriented at realizing cognitive systems for specific application domains and able to provide decisional support for solving complex problems. A key role is played by the natural human-computer interaction, the management and semantic integration of massive amounts of heterogeneous data. 

The workshop provides an opportunity to explore how approaches coming from the two aforementioned research areas could be better combined and integrated to design and realize Cognitive and Robotic Systems. In particular, the workshop seeks original contributions, covering the whole range of theoretical and practical aspects, technologies and systems in such research areas.

Submitted papers will be evaluated by significance, originality, technical quality, and exposition. Papers should clearly establish their research contribution and the relation to the goals of the workshop.