IEEE ICRA 2025

ICRA Expo Finalization of Demo Program and Demo Space Allocation
2025-05-01
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Standard Registration Deadline
2025-05-17
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On-site Registration
2025-05-18 - 2025-05-23

Registration Open
2025-05-18 15:00 - 19:00, 2025-05-19 07:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
Meeting Room: Level 4 Concourse

TEABxSAC DINNER INVITATION For Students and Post-Doctoral Researchers
2025-05-18 17:00 - 20:00
Meeting Room: Atrium – Terrace Tower (Omni Hotel)
We invite everyone including students and postdoctoral researchers to the TAB (Technical Activities Board) & EAB (Educational Activities Board) X SAC (Student Activities Committee) Dinner. This event aims to foster community building among current/former Technical Committees (TCs) and young researchers. Please join us to learn about TCs and SACs, as well as TAB and EAB, and explore opportunities for engagement in the Robotics and Automation Society.
There is no charge for this event, however, space is limited. Please register in advance.

Undergraduate Outreach Workshop
2025-05-19

2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation
2025-05-19 - 2025-05-23 | Georgia World Congress Center, 285 Andrew Young International Blvd NW, Atlanta, GA, United States

Opening Remarks and Introductions
2025-05-19 08:30 - 09:15

4D Radar Technology and Advanced Sensor Fusion AI: From Hardware and Signal Processing of 4D Radar to Camera and LiDAR Integration in AI
2025-05-19 08:30 - 12:30
Meeting Room: 412
This tutorial provides a deep dive into 4D radar technology and its integration with other sensor modalities in multimodal AI, with a focus on robotics applications. As robotic systems increasingly operate in complex and dynamic environments, 4D radar has emerged as a pivotal technology, offering high-resolution spatial and velocity information in all weather conditions.
This tutorial is structured in two parts:

Fundamentals of 4D Radar – We cover system architecture, performance characteristics, and signal processing pipeline. We also introduce AI/ML-based approaches tailored to 4D radar.
Advanced Sensor Fusion AI – We explore the integration of 4D Radar with other sensors, multi-modal datasets, and recent advancements in fusion techniques for detection, tracking, and segmentation.

Throughout, we highlight the impacts of 4D radar technology on autonomous systems, including environmental perception, obstacle avoidance, and autonomous navigation, demonstrating how they enhance situational awareness and decision-making.
By the end, participants will gain a strong foundation in 4D radar and sensor fusion AI, equipping them to drive innovation in robotic perception across diverse applications.

Grand Challenges in Robotics for Nuclear Environments: A Call to Action
2025-05-19 08:30 - 12:30
Meeting Room: 309
The last decade has seen significant progress in the development and use of robots in nuclear environments across fission, fusion, and big science (e.g. CERN). Whilst much of the early application focus was on decommissioning and disaster response in highly radioactive environments, this has shifted significantly to encompass day-to-day operations and maintenance in low-radiation areas. Additionally, fusion energy presents a potentially game-changing solution to present climate and energy security challenges, yet has significant outstanding challenges that need solving including those related to robotic maintenance.
Despite these new opportunities, there are still barriers to the wider robotics community engaging with nuclear end-users. This workshop is a Call to Action to the robotics community, presenting a Grand Challenges which act as focal points for fundamental robotics research. These Grand Challenges have been developed by the global nuclear community specifically for the robotics research community to provide direction for the next 5 – 10 years of research. The workshop will also address how to remove barriers with respect to demonstrating research to the nuclear communities to open the application domain to the whole robotics community, through the use of mechanisms such as digital twins, demonstration environments and accessing real-world test facilities.

Workshops/Tutorials
2025-05-19 08:30 - 17:30
For a detailed list of workshops and tutorials taking place at ICRA 2025, please visit this page: https://2025.ieee-icra.org/workshops-and-tutorials/

Handy Moves: Dexterity in Multi-Fingered Hands
2025-05-19 08:30 - 17:30
Meeting Room: 302
Multi-fingered robotic hands hold an immense potential for flexible manipulation in human environments. From using tools like scissors to preparing food, handling cloth, and robustly tying shoelaces, many mundane activities are enabled by – or become more flexible with – additional degrees of freedom, allowing for in-hand manipulation and dexterous environment interaction. With the ongoing waves of advancement in artificial intelligence, learning techniques, robust teleoperation, the proliferation of affordable tactile sensors, and the expansion of diverse datasets, we are closer than ever to overcome major existing challenges and unlock unprecedented levels of dexterity in robotic manipulation.However, we also acknowledge the current state of research: In practical applications, multi-fingered hands usually demonstrate a lower grasping and manipulation success rate compared to two-fingered parallel grippers; more robotic datasets and benchmarks focus on grippers than on multi-fingered hands; and grippers already serve a wide range of industrial applications. In light of these challenges, this workshop is dedicated to exploring a critical question: how can we overcome the challenges of dexterous manipulation and unlock the potential of multi-fingered hands?
This workshop intends to answer this question in four key aspects:
1. Investigating Manipulation Limitations: Understanding the constraints linked to mechanical design and control
2. Examining Advanced Algorithms: Reviewing state-of-the-art algorithms for dexterous manipulation
3. Enhancing Dexterity and Adaptability: Exploring new paradigms to improve the dexterity and adaptability of robotic hands
4. Envisioning the Future: Considering how foundational models can revolutionize dexterous manipulation
The objective of this workshop is to foster collaboration among researchers at all career stages with a strong interest in robotics, artificial intelligence, control theory, mechanical design, and related fields.

ROBOT-ASSISTED ENDOVASCULAR INTERVENTIONS: Challenges and Opportunities
2025-05-19 08:30 - 17:30
Meeting Room: 303
Vascular diseases are leading causes of ischemic heart disease and stroke and lead to significant global mortality. Endovascular interventions, such as neuroendovascular and cardiovascular interventions are a minimally invasive approach that provides the benefit of faster recovery, less general anesthesia, reduced blood loss, and lower mortality compared to open surgery. This approach now includes advanced procedures like complex aneurysm repair, stent placement for peripheral artery disease, valve replacement, and novel therapy delivery beyond traditional cardiac ablation, angioplasty, and stenting.
Despite its advantages, endovascular intervention face limitations such as excessive radiation exposure, lack of 3D mapping and haptic feedback. Robotically steerable catheter and guidewire technologies have emerged as a promising solution, enhancing precision, stability, reducing radiation doses, and improving access to complex anatomies.
The workshop aims to explore clinical opportunities, technical requirements, and regulatory challenges for robot-assisted endovascular interventions. It seeks to unite researchers, engineers, and clinicians from academia and industry to discuss and identify new applications and barriers in this field. The workshop’s goal is to foster collaboration between academia and industry to address and overcome the technical, clinical, regulatory, and translational challenges for practical clinical implementation of robotic endovascular interventions.

Thermal Infrared in Robotics
2025-05-19 08:30 - 17:30
Meeting Room: 407
Achieving robust autonomy in robotics is challenged by sensor data reliability, especially in extreme environments. Conventional sensors like RGB cameras fail in low-visibility conditions (e.g., smoke, fog, low light), while active sensors such as Radar and Lidar struggle with reflective medium and particle obscurants and often lack dense information at close range. Thermal infrared cameras offer advantages for robust sensing: they work well in low light, provide high-resolution imaging, and are crucial for search and rescue and hazard detection. However, they face challenges, such as noise from flat field correction, ambiguous tone-mapping, difficult calibration, and temperature drifts. With the advent of compact, affordable thermal cameras, interest in thermal imaging for robotics is growing beyond military and surveillance usage.
This workshop aims to advance the emerging field by providing a platform for sharing developments in localization, mapping, navigation, segmentation, detection, and other methods tailored for thermal infrared imagery. We will invite leading researchers and experts to share insights and breakthroughs while encouraging contributions from newcomers and diverse backgrounds. Attendees will engage in discussions, network with experts, and explore future directions, making it invaluable for advancing thermal imaging in robotics.

2nd Unconventional Robots: Rethinking Robotic Systems Beyond Convention
2025-05-19 08:30 - 17:30
Meeting Room: 312
When you think about a robot, what comes to mind? A humanoid, quadruped, quadcopter, or a multi-degree of freedom robot arm? These standard robot morphologies have become widely commercialized and are often our go-to general purpose systems, benefiting from well-established and accessible tools for working with these robots. However, when a task falls outside of the operational capabilities of these robots, this gives us an opportunity to rethink the design of a robot, making it more unconventional.
An unconventional robot design can offer the potential for enhanced capabilities, improved performance, and operation in complex and unstructured environments. These designs include exploratory robots for space and Earth sciences, modular robots for industrial applications and transportation, and soft robots for medical uses and human interaction. However, unconventional robots are often underactuated or characterized by high degrees of freedom, necessitating the development of novel mechanisms, models, and control strategies.
Building on our first unconventional robots workshop at ICRA 2024, this workshop aims to provide a platform to discuss several key questions:

How can we create systematic approaches for designing, manufacturing, and modeling complex robotic systems?
How can embodied intelligence be integrated into robot design and control?
What strategies can advance unconventional designs from laboratory settings to real-world applications?
How can we bridge the gap between modeling and controlling unconventional robots in simulation and achieving reliable performance in real-world systems?
How will specialized systems and standardized robots coexist in the future?

We aim to bring together researchers and engineers from diverse fields—including mechanism design, modeling and simulation, and robotic sensing and control—to share their insights and experiences in developing and advancing unconventional robots.

4th Workshop on Future of Construction: Safe, Reliable, and Precise Robots in Construction Environments
2025-05-19 08:30 - 17:30
Meeting Room: 315
Our workshop aims to facilitate discussion on construction robotics with an emphasis on perception and navigation in cluttered scenes, mapping of as-built environments, and safety-focused robot-worker interactions.
This workshop will provide a venue for academics and industry practitioners to connect and create a vision for robotics in construction work and ensure equitable participation in planning for the future of construction workplaces. The full-day workshop will feature presentations by distinguished speakers from both industry and academia, a spatio-temporal registration challenge sponsored by Hilti, as well as interactive activities in the form of poster sessions, breakout groups, industry roundtable, and panel discussions.

Robotics Startup Bootcamp: Building and Scaling Robotics and Hardware Startups
2025-05-19 08:30 - 17:30
Meeting Room: 314
The Robotics Startup Bootcamp, hosted by MassRobotics, is an immersive, full-day workshop designed to equip early-stage robotics startups — or those considering the commercialization of their research — with the essential knowledge and practical skills necessary to thrive in a competitive and fast-paced market.
Whether you’re in the early stages of developing a product or looking to scale your robotics business, this workshop will provide you with a roadmap for navigating the complex world of robotics entrepreneurship. In today’s rapidly evolving robotics and hardware startup ecosystem, entrepreneurs face unique challenges. These challenges stem from the complexity of physical product development, supply chain management, and integrating cutting-edge technologies.
To address these hurdles, the Robotics Startup Bootcamp covers a wide range of foundational topics that are critical to the success of any early-stage robotics company. Key topics include company formation, intellectual property (IP) protection, customer discovery, and proven fundraising strategies. Through hands-on, interactive sessions, participants will gain valuable insights from industry experts, successful entrepreneurs, and legal advisors who have navigated these very challenges. These sessions aim to empower participants with the tools needed to make informed decisions and avoid common pitfalls in the robotics industry.

The Evolving Landscape of Surgical Robotics: Towards AI-Powered Unconventional Instruments and Technologies in the Operating Theatre
2025-05-19 08:30 - 17:30
Meeting Room: International Ballroom E (Omni Hotel)
Robotic surgery is entering an exciting new era where robots are no longer simply mechanical tools under the direct control of a surgeon, but rather fully-fledged cyber-physical systems capable of collaborating with doctors to carry out complex procedures.
Within this evolving landscape, unconventional surgical instruments such as lasers, radiofrequency, and ultrasound probes are taking an increasingly prominent role, promising to deliver unprecedented surgical precision and minimal patient trauma.
This workshop aims to bring together researchers from academia, industry, and the clinical world to discuss the unique opportunities and challenges presented by the introduction of unconventional instruments in robotic surgery. The main focus will be on the role of machine learning and AI in the modeling and control of these instruments, as well as the need for novel robotic designs to accommodate them, highlighting how these technologies can be integrated with surgical robotics to enhance precision, adaptability, and surgical outcomes.
The workshop will feature invited talks, panel discussions, a rising star session, an unconventional surgical instrument demo session, and poster sessions. Findings and conclusions will be summarized into a white paper, which will be released on arXiv and submitted to a reputable journal for publication.

Foundation Models and Neuro-Symbolic AI for Robotics
2025-05-19 08:30 - 17:30
Meeting Room: 305
The field of robotics has experienced significant growth through the integration of machine learning models, particularly with the rise of foundation models, neuro-symbolic AI, generative models (such as large language models and diffusion models), and other emerging techniques. While these methods have transformed areas like computer vision, natural language processing, and computer graphics, their application in robotics remains largely underexplored.
This workshop will address this emerging area by bringing together leading researchers and practitioners in robotics to share insights on the latest advancements, methodologies, and best practices. It will feature invited talks from academic and industrial leaders and technical paper presentations discussing groundbreaking approaches and robotic systems that leverage foundation models and neuro-symbolic AI.
The workshop will also explore current challenges, future research directions, and promote interaction through poster sessions and spotlight talks.

Workshop on Mechanisms in Robot Manipulation: Challenges and New Opportunities
2025-05-19 08:30 - 17:30
Meeting Room: 410
This workshop seeks to bring attention on the vital role of robotic mechanisms in shaping the future of robotic manipulation. We will examine how innovative hardware design can provide a strong foundation for manipulation tasks, improve the generalization and effectiveness of these tasks, and offer elegant solutions to challenges that may be difficult to solve algorithmically.

How do Robots Care? Innovative Strategies and Interfaces for Physically Assistive Robots in Healthcare
2025-05-19 08:30 - 17:30
Meeting Room: 313
Recent advancements in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) have enabled assistive robots to realize many activities alongside and with humans in shared environments. This physical proximity has introduced novel, complex tasks for the robotics community to address, which can be clustered into three main areas:

Personal care robots that facilitate humans in physical activities of daily living,
Service robots that can perform manipulation tasks for and with humans, and
Physical support robots that provide partial body weight support and assist and guide the humans during stance, walking, and other activities.

However, despite their potential to transform healthcare and beneficial societal impact, such technologies still need to face several unresolved challenges to become part of our everyday lives. This workshop will explore the following emerging user-centric tools that are essential for overcoming such challenges:

Human Modeling and Assessment, definition of models for online and non-invasive monitoring of the human physical and cognitive state and impairments;
Assistive Hardware, design of versatile and reconfigurable interfaces and devices that exploit (do not avoid) physical contact for seamless interaction;
Personalized learning and interaction, developing techniques for learning and adapting robot behavior to individual intentions, actions, and preferences.

The focus will be on individualized models, adaptive control and planning algorithms, customizable designs and robotic interfaces, and human-informed online learning and optimization techniques. A prominent theme throughout the workshop is interdisciplinary collaboration, connecting the expertise of academics, occupational experts, and industry partners. We aim to provide a platform for fruitful discussion, inspiring new perspectives and pathways for the community to successfully design and integrate individualized service, care, and physical assistive robots into society.

Robot Safety Under Uncertainty from Intangible Specifications
2025-05-19 08:30 - 17:30
Meeting Room: 405
Robot and automation systems are expected to carry out increasingly sophisticated tasks in complex environments. This places stringent expectations on their autonomy stack to enforce operational constraints and safety guarantees. Safe control synthesis methods, including model predictive control, reachability analysis, and control barrier functions, commonly rely on explicit mathematical definitions of safety constraints with known system and environment models. Nevertheless, many current applications incorporate perception uncertainty or semantic concepts in the task specifications, and safety requirements may be specified implicitly, abstractly, or incompletely.
This workshop aims to investigate the concept and formulation of such “intangible” safety constraints. These constraints may not be specified explicitly as mathematical expressions but described through natural language, semantic concepts, observed by sensor data anomalies, or inferred from demonstrations and prior experience. The techniques required to either identify such safety constraints or to propagate uncertainty through them are largely unexplored.
Our workshop is interested in various facets of these techniques including: identification of safety constraints from demonstration, compatibility of learned constraints and control design methodology, interaction with humans or vision-language models for safety information, and associated uncertainty quantification. The workshop invites experts in the field to discuss the formulation, optimization, and guarantees with intangible safety constraints.

State of the Art in Lower-Limb Exoskeletons: Exploring Specificity vs. Generalizability Across Users and Activities
2025-05-19 08:30 - 17:30
Meeting Room: 403
Emerging robotic exoskeletons have the potential to enhance performance of non-disabled users, restore normative leg biomechanics to impaired users, or rehabilitate limb function after neurological disorders. However, these devices have not been widely adopted due to their rigidity, bulkiness, acoustic noise, cost, battery life, and/or non-intuitive control. While parallel industries are providing powerful, lightweight, and inexpensive motors with long-lasting batteries, the exoskeleton research community is now largely focused on mechanical design, interface, and control challenges.
One body of work has shown that human walking effort can be reduced by customizing the assistance torque pattern to the user for a given activity through human-in-the-loop optimization. While some results have extended outside the lab, it is unclear how to quickly generalize these methods across many users and activities. Another body of work has shown that task-agnostic control methods can handle a continuous range of activities without user-specific calibration, for example, predicting human joint torques across activities to reduce muscle effort or metabolic cost.
However, it is unclear how these versatile control methods can be personalized for optimal assistance, especially for clinical patients. This workshop will explore specificity vs. generalizability across users and activities with the goal of finding benefits from both perspectives. This theme will be discussed as it relates to both control and device hardware optimization.

Rust for Robotics: Building Robust Foundations for Tomorrow's Autonomous Systems
2025-05-19 08:30 - 17:30
Meeting Room: 404
This workshop explores the potential of Rust programming language in addressing current challenges in robotics software development. Bringing together industry leaders, academics, and open-source contributors, the workshop will cover Rust’s value proposition for robotics, its ecosystem, its role in research and education, adoption challenges, and potential in emerging fields.
Through presentations, panel discussions, demos, and poster sessions, participants will gain insights into Rust’s capabilities and contribute to strategies for its adoption in robotics. Targeting software engineers, researchers, educators, and students, this workshop aims to catalyze a shift towards safer, more efficient programming in robotics, potentially accelerating the development of more reliable and secure autonomous systems across various applications.

7th Workshop on Long-Term Human Motion Prediction
2025-05-19 08:30 - 17:30
Meeting Room: 402
The Long-term Human Motion Prediction (LHMP) workshop, taking place every ICRA in 2019–2024, offers a unique interdisciplinary platform for researchers and practitioners from different communities to discuss the many facets of modeling human motion and behavior in various automated systems. To reflect the broad range of engineering challenges in human-aware systems, we organize the talks of several high-profile invited speakers of diverse academic and industrial backgrounds. Furthermore, in line with the ICRA 2025 ambition to broaden the scope and exchange knowledge, we invite several interdisciplinary scholars of human motion with backgrounds in psychology, sociology, and biology.
Following the recent trends, this year, in all talks, we aim to raise the key question about the emerging General Intelligence models (e.g., LLMs, Visual-Language models) and the perspectives they bring to the study of human motion, human-like navigation, and zero-shot interaction in complex environments. Finally, owing to the strong community of reviewers, we open a call for papers, giving the opportunity to showcase the latest results, particularly inviting student submissions.

REaCT: Robotics for Environmental and Climate Assessment
2025-05-19 08:30 - 17:30
Meeting Room: 408
Surveying biotic and abiotic factors in the Earth’s system is vital for addressing sustainability, climate change, and biodiversity loss. However, collecting comprehensive ecological data at relevant scales remains challenging, as it is often labor-intensive, expertise-dependent, and invasive, necessitating trade-offs between accuracy and resolution. Robotics offers a promising solution by enabling access to complex environments and facilitating the efficient collection of diverse data and samples.
This workshop aims to bridge the gap between robotics and environmental science, creating a platform for interdisciplinary exchange. Participants will discuss the challenges of monitoring aerial, terrestrial, aquatic, and cryosphere environments with robots and identify opportunities for innovation. The goal is to foster dialogue between roboticists and environmental scientists, paving the way for new technologies and methodologies that can enhance our understanding of the Earth system and contribute to more effective environmental monitoring and management.

Robots in the Wild
2025-05-19 08:30 - 17:30
Meeting Room: 411
In the field, we throw robots into the wild to achieve what seems a simple task, that quickly ends up being arduous. As experts, we continuously loop through designing, developing, deploying, and analyzing our autonomous systems until it meets some level of success. From marine to forestry, from mining to agriculture, no matter the various applications, field robotics is an ambitious area of work. The standards of success are rising, given the advancements in robot designs and algorithmic frameworks, but so too are new challenges arising, limiting the advancement of field robotics. This workshop brings together experts and new enthusiasts from various subdomains of field robotics — such as marine, aerial, legged, agriculture, search-and rescue-robotics — to showcase not only the achievements in state-of-the-art field robotics, but more importantly the respective open challenges.
Open questions — spanning from perception and state estimation to control, planning, and multi-robot coordination — for each subdomain that the workshop will explore include: What are established successes? What are the common and unique challenges? Why existing systems and algorithms are not working? What are possible solutions? Can solutions to these challenges generalize to other subdomains? What problems should we focus more on? The vision is to create shared perspectives from the various subdomains that will foster the identification of shared challenges and cross-domain solutions, encourage networking, exchange of experiences, project inspirations, and new collaborations, towards building robust robots in the wild.

1st Workshop on Acoustic Sensing and Representations for Robotics (RoboAcoustics)
2025-05-19 08:30 - 17:30
Meeting Room: 316
Acoustic sensing is rapidly emerging as a critical area of research, offering new possibilities for robust robotic perception, localization, and interaction in complex environments. This workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from various domains and disciplines to discuss the latest advancements, challenges, and future directions in acoustic sensing for robotics. Acoustic sensors, including microphones, sonar, and ultrasonic devices, provide unique advantages in scenarios where vision-based perception may be limited by adversarial lighting conditions, occlusions, or environmental complexity.
Acoustic sensors may endow robots with heightened situational awareness, allow them to reason about interactions with the environment and enable sound-based feedback mechanisms that can react to voice commands or environment noise. However, acoustic signals also present unique open challenges, such as susceptibility to noise, multi-path propagation effects, the need for real-time processing in dynamic environments, and extracting acoustic features or learning representations that are robust to context-dependent distortions. Addressing these challenges is crucial for unlocking the full potential of acoustic sensing in robotics.

Robot Software Architectures 2025
2025-05-19 08:30 - 17:30
Meeting Room: International Ballroom C (Omni Hotel)
RSA25 is intended to create a forum where researchers, practitioners, and professionals can discuss on principles and practice in the use of advanced software development techniques for building robot software architectures. The Robotics community is aware of the importance that software development principles have in building advanced robotics systems. Several interesting initiatives are taking place in the field of open source development, distributed middleware, standard architectures.
The nature of the workshop is quite concrete. It is not a tutorial on abstract Software Engineering methodologies and does not present yet another software development process built on proprietary technologies or robotic projects. Instead, it shows how the state-of-the-art software development practice in robotics meet the principles of software engineering.​
