Motivation, scope, objective.
The goal of the PSSCR'07 is to bring together researchers and students from various areas of robotics, computer vision, cognitive sciences and machine learning. In these fields it is absolutely essential that the research problems are not studied in isolation but rather in the context of a complete and reliably operating technical system. One problem with research in integrated embedded systems is that developers need competence in many disciplines, including complex system design, perception, robotics, control theory, and artificial intelligence. Few researchers are generalists who can bridge the gaps between the disciplines and often the resulting systems are heavily biased towards individual capabilities such as vision-based perception. Small research groups do not have the necessary resources to develop and operate such systems on their own.
Consequently, the intelligent robotics research community increasingly relies on open source software development teams, geographically distributed all over the world. One of the most successful of these initiatives in the autonomous robotics community is the Player Project, with developers from over 50 research groups and institutions worldwide.
In PSSCR'07, we bring together the leading software designers, developers and users of the Player Project to give lectures and practical courses to the researchers in the fields of autonomous robotics and cognitive technical systems -- in particular, to graduate students and young researchers.
In an 8-day marathon, we will investigate core problems (and solutions) in the field of technical cognitive systems, with an emphasis on implementation and architecture, allowing the participants to bring back the knowledge of integrated system design and realization to their own research groups.
A primary focus of the school is the Player software suite which is widely used in classrooms and laboratories around the world and has become a de facto standard in the robotics and ubiquitous computing research communities.






