Copyright '2022 for the individual papers by the papers' authors. Copyright '2022 for the volume as a collection by its editors. This volume and its papers are published under the Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Editors' addresses: The goal of the Italian workshop series on Arti cial Intelligence and RObotics (AIRO) is to present, discuss and assess recent advances in the deployment of Arti cial Intelligence (AI) methods in Robotics. AI principles and methods play a crucial role in several areas of the robotics research (e.g. eld, service, social robotics, etc.) and are pervasively exploited at various levels of robot architectures for di erent purposes: sensing and perception, reasoning and decision, learning, intelligent control, adaptive and social behavior, veri cation and validation methods, etc. Starting from these diverse -yet intertwined- research elds, the AIRO workshop series aims at providing an established long-term Italian forum where the AI community and the Robotics community may nd an interesting and stimulating common ground.
This volume contains the proceedings of the eighth edition of the AIRO workshop1, which was held on 30 November 2021 in conjunction with the 20th International Conference of the Italian Association for Arti cial Intelligence (AIxIA 2021). Due to COVID-19, the AIRO 2021 workshop (along with all the events of AIxIA 2021) was virtually accessible \anywhere" in the world through the internet.
This edition of the AIRO workshop accepted 11 papers involving 40 authors. The program was structured into three sections Collaborative and Social Robotics, Robot Planning and Learning, and Mobile Robotics. The contributions covered several aspects of AI and Robotics in the areas of service, social, and assistive robotics and they were mainly concerned with the following research topics: human-robot interaction, robot learning, task planning, task assignment, learning and planning, multirobots, planning under uncertainty, cloud robotics, ontologies, robot navigation.
The workshop program also included the keynote talk of Prof. Alessandro Farinelli, full professor at the University of Verona, Department of Computer Science, titled Safe Reinforcement Learning for Intelligent Robotic Systems.
The research topics and the results collected in these proceedings illustrate the work of an active and multidisciplinary research community and con rm the growing interest in a forum where AI and Robotics researchers can nd a common ground.
Salvatore Anzalone, Luca Buoncompagni, Alberto Castellini, Alberto Finzi Workshop Organizers 1 https://www.airo-aixia.it/airo2021/
Alberto Finzi University of Naples \Federico II" Alberto Castellini University of Verona Luca Buoncompagni University of Genoa
Salvatore Anzalone Universite Paris 8