International Workshop on
Evolutionary and Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Robot Systems

The 7th ERLARS workshop, ERLARS 2014, will take place in Berlin, Germany in December 2014 at the HTW University of Applied Sciences. More details will follow soon.

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 7th ERLARS workshop, ERLARS 2014, will take place in Berlin, Germany in December 2014 at the HTW University of Applied Sciences. More details will follow soon.

The 6th ERLARS workshop, ERLARS 2013, has taken place in Taormina, Italy on September 2 2013 in conjunction with the 12th European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL 2013).

The 5th ERLARS workshop, ERLARS 2012, was held in Montpellier, France on Tuesday, August 28 2012 in conjunction with the The 20th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2012).

The 4th ERLARS workshop, ERLARS 2011, has taken place in Berlin, Germany on Friday/Saturday, December 9/10 2011 at the HTW University of Applied Sciences Berlin.

The 3rd ERLARS workshop, ERLARS 2010, was held in Lisboa, Portugal on Monday, August 16 2010 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 in Patras, Greece on July 22 2008 in conjunction with The 18th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, ECAI 2008.

The proceedings of the workshops are published in print with the ISSN 2190-5576 and additionally online. You are welcome to access these in our ERLARS proceedings page.