RoboAcoustics@ICRA 2025

1st Workshop on Acoustic Sensing and Representations for Robotics

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2025 - Workshop

May 19, 2025, Atlanta, GA, USA

Location:

Email: roboacoustics@googlegroups.com

Zoom: Link (Coming Soon)

Abstract

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.

Call for Papers

Important Dates:

Submission Deadline: March 28, 2025 23:59 ET April 9, 2025 23:59 ET
Decisions: April 15, 2025
Camera Ready: May 1, 2025 May 11, 2025 23:59 ET
Workshop: May 19, 2025

Topics of Interest

Partially supported by Computer & Robot Vision TC, the workshop will cover a wide range of topics, including but not limited to:

Signal processing techniques to extract acoustic signal features from raw sensor readings
Auditory signal design and communication with robots (e.g., integration with LLMs) for effective human-robot interaction and haptics
Representation learning for acoustic signals, studying its impact on robotic perception and decision-making
Foundation models that can utilize acoustic signals for generalizable scene understanding across diverse tasks
Sensor fusion techniques that combine acoustic data with visual, tactile, or other sensory inputs for enhanced situational awareness
Generative models or simulation frameworks for generating synthetic acoustic datasets
Data-efficient learning approaches for acoustic perception in resource-constrained robotic systems
Applications of acoustic sensing for manipulation, navigation, human-robot interaction, environmental monitoring, and other robotics domains
Challenges in designing and deploying acoustic sensors in real-world robotic systems
Preliminary studies demonstrating practical implementations of acoustic sensing for robotics
Simulation and synthetic data generation for audio and vibrotactile signals
Design processes for embedding acoustic sensors on different robot embodiments (e.g., arms, end-effectors, mobile robots)

Tentative Schedule

9:00 - 9:10: Opening Remarks

9:10 - 10:10: Speaker Session 1

9:10 - 9:40: Ruohan Gao

9:40 - 10:10: Lerrel Pinto

10:10-11:00: Coffee Break and Poster Session 1

11:00 - 12:00: Speaker Session 2

11:00 - 11:30: Shabnam Ghaffarzadegan

11:30 - 12:00: Oliver Brock

12:00 - 13:30: Lunch

13:30 - 14:30: Speaker Session 3

13:30 - 14:00: Kazuhiro Nakadai

14:00 - 14:30: Naomi Fitter

14:30 - 15:00: Spotlight Talks

15:00 - 16:00: Break and Posters

16:00 - 16:30: Speaker Session 4 -

16:00 - 16:30: Shuran Song

16:30 - 17:00 [30 min]: Panel discussion/Round Table

Panelists: Lerrel Pinto, Shabnam Ghaffarzadegan, Kazuhiro Nakadai, Naomi Fitter, Shuran Song, Ruohan Gao, and Oliver Brock

17:00 - 17:05 [5 min]: Closing remarks

Submission Info

We solicit up to 4 pages (excluding references and appendices) submissions conforming to the IEEE Template. The review process will be double-blind and will use OpenReview.

Submissions can include late-breaking results, material under review, and archived papers(please make a note of this in the submission).

Please note the accepted contributions will be presented in an interactive poster format (non-archival). A set of these will be featured as spotlight talks. The accepted contributions and posters will be posted on the workshop website upon author approval.