Call for Submissions to the Workshop on Open Robotics Software at the 2026 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots & Systems
Submissions do not need to be anonymized. The workshop is non-archival, and accepted contributions will be presented as talks or posters.
Submission Deadline: Sep 14, 2026 (extended from Sep 1, 2026)
Notification of Paper Acceptance: Sep 16, 2026 (previously Sep 10, 2026)
Venue Start Date: Sep 27, 2026
Submission site: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=iros2026ors
AIM AND SCOPE
This workshop will discuss the long-term challenges of maintaining widely used robotics libraries across simulation, planning and control, perception, and infrastructure. These tools are essential to research, but keeping them current and reliable requires steady support from academia, industry, and the open-source community. The workshop will bring together developers or maintainers of major robotics frameworks to share best practices on creating, growing, and sustaining contributor communities, securing funding, and adopting governance models that balance research innovation with software stability. We will also consider how newer, mainly learning-oriented, tools and frameworks co-exist with more traditional robot software libraries. The workshop will address challenges of adoption and long-term sustainability.
The goal of this workshop is to strengthen the robotics community by promoting sustainable software practices that support reproducible research, accelerate innovation, and enable broader participation in developing the next generation of robotic systems.
TOPICS OF INTEREST
Sustainable development and long-term maintenance of robotics software for simulation, perception, planning, control, and middleware
Reproducibility of robotics research through open-source software, datasets, benchmarks, and experimental workflows
Integration of learning-based frameworks with traditional model-based robotics methods and architectures
Interoperability and standardization across robot simulators, middleware, sensors, hardware, and software frameworks
Testing, verification, continuous integration, and reliability assessment for robotics software systems
Case studies and best practices for developing, deploying, scaling, and sustaining widely used robotics software frameworks
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
We invite submissions of new (track 1) and previously published (track 2) work. Submissions to this workshop (both tracks) do not need to be anonymized for review. All submitted papers will undergo a review process to assess their relevance to the workshop. All manuscripts must be written in English and submitted electronically in PDF format.
We do not plan to compile a proceedings volume. Authors will present their work in the format of talks or posters during the workshop.
Track 1: Extended Abstracts.
We invite abstracts of research, surveys, and position papers. Submissions can encompass various types of work, including ongoing projects with preliminary findings, technical reports, case studies, opinion pieces, surveys, and cutting-edge research in the realms of open-source robotics software. For Track 1, submissions should be one to two pages, including figures and references, using 11-point font in any PDF format.
Track 2: Previously Published Papers.
We invite submissions of published works that are relevant to the workshop’s aims and scope, including but not limited to research papers, surveys, position papers, and demos. Authors will have the opportunity to further share their work with the workshop attendees and a broad audience. For Track 2, submissions should be a copy of the previously published paper in any PDF format.
For any further information or questions, please contact Qingxi Meng <qm15@rice.edu> and Weihang Guo <wg25@rice.edu>. We look forward to your participation!