Steady improvements in robot hardware have not been matched by corresponding advancements in robot software. Besides fundamental open problems still waiting for sound answers, the development of new robotics applications still suffers the lack of widely used tools, libraries, and algorithms ready to be incorporated into new projects.

Writing robot software continues to be a time-consuming and error-prone process, and software results already achieved within the community are not extensively capitalized or shared. Simulation environments are playing a role in reducing development time and cost of large scale systems, but their use is still regarded by many as suspicious.

Seamless migration of code from general purpose simulators to real world systems is still a rare circumstance, due to the complexity of robot, world, sensors, and actuators modeling. Novel robotics applications driven by society and industry call for the development of systems of ever increasing complexity: systems with sliding autonomy; humanoid robots; distributed robots; mobile sensor networks.
These challenges drive the quest for next generation development tools in robotics.



The International Conference on Simulation, Modeling, and Programming for Autonomous Robots (SIMPAR) has the objective to bring together researchers from academia and industry to identify and solve the key issues necessary to ease the development of robot software and boost a smooth shifting of results from simulated to real applications.