Research in robotics has traditionally emphasized low-level sensing and control tasks including sensory processing, path planning, and manipulator design and control. In contrast, research in cognitive robotics is concerned with endowing robots and software agents with higher-level cognitive functions that enable them to reason, act, and perceive in changing, incompletely known, and unpredictable environments. Such robots must, for example, be able to reason about goals, actions, when to perceive and what to look for, the cognitive states of other agents, time, collaborative task execution, etc. In short, cognitive robotics is concerned with integrating reasoning, perception and action with a uniform theoretical and implementation framework.
The use of both software robots (softbots) and physical robotic artifacts in everyday life is on the upswing and we are seeing increasingly more examples of their use in society with commercial products around the corner and some already on the market. As interaction with humans increases, so does the demand for sophisticated robotic capabilities associated with deliberation and high-level cognitive functions. Combining results from the traditional robotics discipline with those from AI and cognitive science has and will continue to be central to research in cognitive robotics. The 2025 edition of the workshop will focus on the limitations of complementary approaches such as machine learning and classical AI in the context of high level control and the question how these approaches can be combined to overcome the limitations.
The 2025 edition of the International Cognitive Robotics Workshop (CogRob 2025), to be held as part of the KR 2025 conference in Melbourne, Australia, continues the tradition of cognitive robotics events and offers a venue for researchers to discuss all aspects of cognitive robotics research. More details about submitting to the workshop can be found in the Call for Papers.