CALL FOR NOMINATIONS IEEE & Robotics and Automation Society Awards Nominations for the following IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Awards are due March 1, 2011. * * * * * * * * RAS Chapter of the Year Award RAS Most Active Technical Committee Award RAS Most Active Distin guished Lecturer Award RAS Pioneer Award RAS Early Career Award IEEE-RAS Distinguished Service Award IEEE Inaba Technical Award for Innov ation Leading to Production IEEE RAS George Saridis L eadership Award in Robotics and Automation A description and list of previous recipients of each award is available on the RAS awards webpage at http://www.ieeeras/member/awardsRAS.php. Nominators should use the appropriate Nomination Forms which are available on the awards page. Please send the completed nominations form to the RAS Administrator at administrator@ieee-ras.org. * IEEE/IFR Invention and Entrepreneurship Award: See the separate announcement in this issue for requirements for this joint award sponsored by the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society and the International Federation of Robotics. Nominations are due February 18. * IEEE Technical Field Award: Nominations for the IEEE Robotics Technical Field Award must be submitted to the IEEE by January 31. Please see http://www.ieee.org/portal/pages/about/awards/sums/robotaut.html for details and instructions for nominators. * IEEE Fellow: Nominations for IEEE Fellow must be submitted to the IEEE by March 1. Please see http://www.ieee.org/web/membership/fellows/fellow_apps.html for applications and instructions. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2010.938857 Call for Papers : Formal Methods for Robotics and Automation A special issue of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine Introduction Guaranteeing safety, predictability and reliability of robots and their high-level behaviors is crucial for the assimilation of such systems into society, be it at home or in the workplace. Every robotics researcher working with physical robots is aware of safety issues; however, only recently people have begun to look at ways to either formally prove or guarantee by design different behavioral properties such as safety and correctness. While formal methods have been successfully applied to areas such as hardware design, the unique nature of robotics requires new theory and algorithms for verification and synthesis of correct systems. Researchers are invited to contribute papers that explore the state of the art in formal methods for robotics and automation. Scope, description and more information * Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: * Verification of robotic and automation systems * Use of model checking and deductive verification techniques in robotics * Correct by design planner/controller synthesis * Lessons that can be learned from hardware/software verification and synthesis * Applications of formal methods to robotic systems Important dates Call for papers 23 July 2010 Deadline for paper submission 01 January 2011 First review 01 April 2011 Final review 01 May 2011 Publication September 2011 Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2010.938856 Guest Editor Hadas Kress-Gazit Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Cornell University hadaskg@cornell.eduhttp://www.ieee http://www.ieee.org/portal/pages/about/awards/sums/robotaut.html http://www.ieee.org/web/membership/fellows/fellow_apps.html