Breaking the Surface - lessons learned from over a decade of interdisciplinary workshops

Maritime robotics have become increasingly popular over the past few decades for a myriad of applications. However, often, end-users are not fully aware of the potentialities of the technology and technology developers are not able to know all the end-users needs. Thinking of this need for better mutual awareness between the application fields end-users and roboticists, the International Interdisciplinary Field Workshop of Maritime Robotics and Applications 'Breaking the Surface' (BtS) was created in 2009. This is a very successful workshop that has been running for 12 years. A description of the workshop, its history and lessons learn over the organization of 13 editions are included in this paper.