Important Dates

Submission Deadline:  April 3rd, 2026, 11:59PM AOE*

Notification of Acceptance: April 20th, 2026

Camera-ready Submission: May 20th, 2026, 11:59PM AOE

*If you are expecting longer visa processing timeline due to your home country, please email the workshop organizers to discuss an expedited review timeline.

Abstract

Perception is key to enabling resilient robotic autonomy in extreme environments, underpinning critical tasks such as marine imaging, planetary exploration, and lunar in-situ resource utilization. Robotic operations in harsh environments---including marine and space domains---share many common challenges, including limited computational power, unforgiving noisy sensor measurements, sparse visual features, challenging lighting conditions, GPS-denied operations, and a lack of real-world datasets. Recent developments in foundation models, 3D neural representations, and high-fidelity simulations from the vision community hold promise for accelerating robot sensing capabilities in solving these tasks. However, unique challenges encountered underwater and in space make it challenging to adopt these advancements directly. Additionally, researchers in these different domains often operate in isolation from one another, attending different conference venues.

This workshop, titled From Sea to Space: Advancing Perception in Harsh Domains has two primary aims: 

1. Connecting researchers working on perception in marine and space applications.

2. Discussing how state-of-the-art vision techniques can be adapted for perception in the field.

Through invited talks, a panel discussion, and industry spotlights, this workshop aims to inspire cross-domain collaboration and transfer of state-of-the-art developments from the vision community to robotics for harsh environments.

Confirmed Speakers

Call for Papers

Submission Portal: https://openreview.net/group?id=IEEE.org/ICRA/2026/Workshop/S2S

Paper Submission Guidelines

Submitted papers should be a maximum of 6 pages in length, not including citations/acknowledgements/appendices. Papers should be formatted using the IEEE ICRA Word/Latex templates.

Paper Submission Topics

We welcome papers on topics related to perception for field robotics, particularly focused on underwater and space domains. The workshop topics include but are not limited to:

• Perception for scene reconstruction in harsh environments (e.g., 3D neural scene representations, real-time 3D reconstruction, multi-sensor fusion)

• Explainable and trustworthy perception systems (e.g., probabilistic methods with robust uncertainty estimation, interpretable vision models)

• Perception for target tracking in low lighting (e.g., feature extraction/matching, crater identification)

• Perception and learning for novel sensors (e.g., event cameras, radar, star trackers, sonar, TIR cameras)

• Foundation models for perception in harsh environments (e.g., fine-tuning foundation models for marine, subterranean,  or space applications)

• Robust localization and mapping in degraded sensing conditions (e.g., SLAM in poor lighting/dusty environments, GPS-denied global localization, multi-sensor fusion)

• Datasets and scalable simulation for closing the sim-to-real gap (e.g., marine or simulation development, synthetic datasets, systems leveraging simulated data)

• Computationally-efficient perception for edge deployment (e.g., lightweight machine learning models, field reports from real-time systems deployed in harsh environments)

• Enabling long-term autonomy (e.g., systems that handle sensor failure, GPS-denied global localization)

Authors of accepted papers will be expected present a poster in-person at ICRA Vienna. A select number of papers will be highlighted as "spotlight" papers, and the authors will have the opportunity to give a short minute talk about their paper during the workshop program.

Organizers

If you need to contact the organizers, please email icra-s2s-organizers@umich.edu.