AC-RSN 2025: Advances and Challenges in Robot Social Navigation @ ECMR 2025

The AC-RSN 2025 half-day workshop is intended to enhance the interaction between academic and industry partners regarding the advances and challenges of Robot Social Navigation.

Social navigation of service robots in human-populated environments is a key challenge to enable autonomous robotic platforms to support humans in their daily lives. Recent research on Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has increasingly focused on equipping robots with the ability to perceive, interpret, and adapt to complex social dynamics, enabling them to coexist safely with humans. Emerging methodologies leverage Large Vision Language models, Reinforcement Learning, and hybrid AI-model-based control systems to enhance robot navigation capabilities. Despite these advances, significant challenges remain to achieve truly robust social navigation. One core challenge is defining and implementing the expected behaviors that balance navigation efficiency, friendliness, and safety, to ensure that robots navigate without causing discomfort. Moreover, standardizing metrics for evaluating social navigation performance remains a pressing issue, as traditional metrics such as time and distance fail to capture the complexity of human-robot interactions.

This half-day workshop aims to bring together leading experts in mobile service robotics, social navigation, learning methods, and human-robot interaction to discuss the latest developments and challenges in the field.  It also looks at the latest innovations brought about by leading companies and startups in the field and serves as a bridge with the academic world.

Submission Guidelines

Authors shall submit their contributions in the following format:

• Short Papers: We welcome theoretical or empirical contributions describing ongoing projects or completed work. We encourage original ideas and contributions, also currently under review. The papers should be prepared with the IEEE RAS conference two-columns style template. The maximum length of papers is 4 pages excluding references.

• Posters: Accepted papers will be presented with an oral pitch and a poster. Posters are required to follow A1 format.

Submissions will be handled through EasyChair here. In case of issues please contact directly the committee to submit a PDF version of your work.

Authors are invited to publish a pre-print version of the papers on arXiv and link it to the submission.

Paper Submission Deadline: July 14th, 2025

Paper Author Notification: July 25th 2025

List of Topics

• Robot Social Behavior: challenges in defining the expected behaviors of robots in social contexts.

• Evaluation Metrics: development of socially-aware metrics for performance evaluation.

• Social robot navigation: novel solutions to navigate safely and respecting social norms in human crowded environments, from global planning to local controller methods. Novel approaches based on learning models or hybrid AI-model-based methods are welcomed.

• Large Visual-Language Models (L-VLM) for social navigation: how to exploit and integrate L-VLM in a general perception and navigation framework for mobile robots.

• Efficient perception: novel multi-modal data processing techniques to enhance the perception of mobile robots in social environments.

• Scalability and adaptability in diverse and dynamic settings. Specific methods to address the generalization issues of learning models for social navigation are object of interest.

• Real-world case studies and applications of autonomous mobile robotics with enhanced social behaviors in human-aware contexts. Novel sensors and platforms for service robotics and indoor assistance.

Committees

Program Committee

• Prof. Luis Merino (Full Professor, University Pablo de Olavide, Sevilla).
• Prof. Fernando Caballero (Full Professor, University Pablo de Olavide, Sevilla)
• Prof. Marcello Chiaberge (Associate Professor, Politecnico di Torino)
• Prof. Luis J. Manso (Associate Professor, Aston University, Birmingham)
• Dr. Mauro Martini (Postdoctoral Researcher, Politecnico di Torino)
• Dr. Noé Pérez-Higueras (Postdoctoral Researcher, University Pablo de Olavide, Sevilla)

Invited Speakers

• Phani Teja Singamaneni, Postdoctoral researcher at LAAS-CNRS: Toulouse, FR. Keynote 1: "Reasoning for better negotiations in Socially Aware Robot Navigation".
• Luis J. Manso, Associate Professor, Aston University, Birmingham, UK. Keynote 2: "Recent challenges and opportunities in benchmarking social robot navigation". 
• Pal Robotics (Company presentation)
• ALBA Robot (Company presentation)

Venue

The workshop will take place within the European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR) 2025 in Padua, Italy, on September 2nd 2025 (half-day). Padua (Padova) is a vibrant city in the Veneto region of northeast Italy. To know more about the venue: Padua.

Contact

Please contact us for any questions or doubts regarding the submission process and participation in the workshop.

Mauro Martini, Post-doc researcher,  Politecnico di Torino: mauro.martini@polito.it

Noé Pérez-Higueras,  Post-doc researcher, Pablo de Olavide University: noeperez@upo.es

Luis Merino,  Full Professor, Pablo de Olavide University: lmercab@upo.es