International Workshop on
Evolutionary and Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Robot Systems

The ERLARS 2010 call for papers is available as a PDF file now.

The 3rd ERLARS workshop, ERLARS 2010, will take place at The 19th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2010).

Evolutionary and Reinforcement Learning methods are important learning approaches for neural networks and other knowledge representations. They are inspired by nature and known to be used extensively in biological systems. However, so far their use in artificial cognitive systems, e.g. autonomous robot systems, is limited. This is mainly due to the large number of necessary robot actions and/or learning cycles before an acceptable mapping from perceptions to actions is found. Autonomous robots are becoming more and more common even in non-industrial settings, an example area being toys like Sony's Aibo robotic dog and the new Pleo toy dinosaur. However, they tend to have very limited learning capabilities. These are usually restricted to adjusting a few parameters in an otherwise fixed control strategy that determines how the robot interacts with the environment.

In recent years, fast computers have made evolutionary and reinforcement learning more feasible from a computational point of view. Therefore research in these areas has attracted more attention. A number of new and efficient algorithms have shown promising results, albeit many of these still rely on training in simulated environments or in combinations of offline and online learning.

The main goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers and promote work on evolutionary and reinforcement learning methods with a focus on their (future) application in autonomous robot systems. We believe that in order to achieve this a great deal of fundamental research, e.g. on the efficiency of algorithms, is just as important as their practical applications. Therefore contributions are invited both on theoretical and practical results in this area.

The workshop topics include, but are not limited to:

The 3rd ERLARS workshop, ERLARS 2010, will take place in Lisboa, Portugal on either Monday, August 16 2010 or Tuesday, August 17 2010 (to be announced) in conjunction with the The 19th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2010).

The 2nd ERLARS workshop, ERLARS 2009, has taken place in St. Louis, Missouri, USA on October 15 2009 in conjunction with the The 2009 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent RObots and Systems (IROS 2009).

The 1st ERLARS workshop, ERLARS 2008, was held on in Patras, Greece on July 22 2008 in conjunction with The 18th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, ECAI 2008.