Venue and Date

23 May, 2025 (08:30 - 17:30)

Georgia World Congress Center, Atlanta, USA

Meeting Room 312

Online Attendance (Zoom Meeting Room)

Virtual attendance link: https://gatech.zoom.us/j/93881229523 (Passcode: 576867)

Good News!

We’re excited to share that our workshop will feature a Best RoboCup-Themed Paper Award, generously sponsored by the IEEE RAS Technical Committee for RoboCup!

• The award will be given to an outstanding contributed paper presented at the workshop.
  
  

• It includes travel reimbursement through the IEEE Concur System.
  
  

• We’re also pleased to offer travel support for students from under-represented regions.
  
  

A heartfelt thanks to the IEEE RAS TC for their support in recognizing and uplifting valuable research within the RoboCup community.

More details coming soon!

Overview

The field of robotics is undergoing a transformative shift as athletic and agile robots, capable of dynamic motor skills such as running, jumping, and adaptive locomotion, redefine the possibilities of automation. These advancements promise to revolutionize industries ranging from disaster response and search-and-rescue operations to entertainment and advanced manufacturing. However, the development of highly mobile, dexterous, and energy-efficient robots faces critical challenges, including limitations in real-time environmental adaptability, energy consumption, robustness in unstructured terrains, and safe collaboration with humans.

Robotletics 2.0 seeks to address these challenges by uniting researchers, engineers, and industry leaders to explore cutting-edge innovations in athletic robotics. This workshop will focus on breakthroughs in bio-inspired design, energy-efficient actuation, adaptive learning algorithms for real-time decision-making, and resilient hardware-software integration. By fostering interdisciplinary dialogue, the event aims to accelerate the transition of agile robots from controlled labs to complex, real-world environments.

Aligned with the theme of next-generation robotics, the workshop will emphasize:

• Dynamic Locomotion and Motor Control: Enhancing balance, speed, and precision in unpredictable settings.

• Human-Robot Collaboration: Ensuring safety and intuitive interaction in shared spaces.

• Learning-Driven Agility: Leveraging reinforcement learning and simulation-to-reality frameworks for adaptive behaviors.

• Planning: Synthesizing strategies for sports-playing robots

The full-day event will feature keynote talks by pioneers in robotics, live demonstrations of state-of-the-art agile systems, and interactive sessions including:

• Poster Sessions: Showcase emerging research on mobility, actuation, and AI-driven control.

• Panel Debates: Discuss ethical implications, scalability, and industry adoption of athletic robots.

• Collaborative Workshops: Brainstorm solutions to real-world agility benchmarks.

Robotletics 2.0 will be held as a hybrid event, with live-streamed sessions for virtual participants. Join us to shape the future of robotics, where machines move with the grace, power, and intelligence required to tackle the world’s most demanding challenges.

Schedules

Invited Speakers

Accepted Submissions

• Dynamic Regrasping with Asynchronous Vision Feedback using a Minimalist Robotic System (Yuxiang Ma, Edward H Adelson)

• Reinforcement Learning Within the Classical Robotics Stack: A Case Study in Robot Soccer (Adam Labiosa, Zhihan Wang, Siddhant Agarwal, William Cong, Geethika Hemkumar, Abhinav Narayan Harish, Benjamin Hong, Josh Kelle, Chen Li, Yuhao Li, Zisen Shao, Peter Stone, Josiah P. Hanna)

• Whole-Body Contact Sensing via Distributed Low-Cost Joint Torque Sensors for Legged Robots (Jared Grinberg, Yanran Ding)

• CASC: A Coaxial, Agile, and Servo-less tailsitter UAV with X-wing Configuration (Haotian Li, Nan Chen)

• Toward Agile and Dynamic Machines: A Survey of Athletic Robotics Systems and Strategies (Zaid Ghazal, Ali Al-Bustami)

• Environment as Policy: Learning to Race in Unseen Tracks (Jiaxu Xing, Hongze Wang, Nico Messikommer, Davide Scaramuzza)

• AllGaits: Learning All Quadruped Gaits and Transitions (Guillaume Bellegarda, Milad Shafiee Ashtiani, Auke Ijspeert)

• Time-Correlated Action Sampling in Model Predictive Path Integral (Minhyeong Lee, Dongjun Lee)

• Whole-body end-effector pose tracking (Tifanny Portela, Andrei Cramariuc, Mayank Mittal, Marco Hutter)

• Dom, cars don't fly!---Or do they? In-Air Vehicle Maneuver for High-Speed Off-Road Navigation  (Anuj Pokhrel, Aniket Datar, Xuesu Xiao)

Call for Papers and Video Demos

We invite researchers to submit their contributions to the workshop in the form of short papers (2 pages) accompanied by video demonstrations or standalone papers (4 pages). These submissions should align with the workshop's topics of interest and will serve as a basis for initiating discussions during the event. Accepted papers will be presented as posters, presentations, and videos, and with the authors' permission, they will be published on the workshop website. 

Topics of Interest include:

• Systems design enabling athletic behaviors in robots

• Real-time controllers and planners for athletic movements

• Safety frameworks for athletic robots

• Sensing and state estimation under time and compute constraints with incomplete and imperfect knowledge of the world

• Communication systems for robotic team sports

• Synthesizing strategies for sports-playing robots

• Human-robot collaboration for athletic and agile robots

We encourage submissions that demonstrate and benchmark their approaches on sports-related applications such as table tennis, tennis, soccer, air hockey, and others. 

Submission Website: ICRA 2025 Workshop RoboLetics | OpenReview 

Important Dates:

• Paper submission deadline: 20th April, 2025 (Anywhere on Earth)

• Video demonstration submission deadline: 20th April, 2025 (Anywhere on Earth)

• Author notification: TBD  (We are working to assign and receive reviews as soon as possible. If you have a submission that requires a faster review for any reason, please don't hesitate to reach out to us.)

• Camera-ready submission: TBD

Authors can submit demo papers of 1-2 pages accompanied with videos or 4 pages standalone contributions. All papers must be submitted in PDF and must follow the IEEE Conference format. All papers will be peer-reviewed (single-blind). Both unpublished original contributions and previously published work may be submitted.  

We look forward to receiving your submissions and engaging in fruitful discussions at the workshop.

Organizers

Contact

All questions about submissions or workshop should be emailed to any of the following people: 

• Zulfiqar Haider Zaidi (email: zzaidi8@gatech.edu) 

• Kin Man Lee (email: klee863@gatech.edu)

• Alap Kshirsagar (email: alap.kshirsagar@tu-darmstadt.de) 

Previous workshops

1. RoboLetics