We invite workshop paper submissions on ideas and experimental evaluations related to open-world navigation (OWN). Papers may be based on new and unpublished work, or may be non-archival abstract based on prior publications. We ask that authors highlight which category their papers fall under. The workshop organizers will try to provide more comprehensive reviews for papers based on new and unpublished work. Do note that submissions should not take the form of an existing paper that is published or under review, and an accepted paper cannot be considered published as a peer-reviewed paper.

Topics of Interest

We invite contributions in areas including, but not limited to the following navigation-related topics:

  • Generalizing Navigation to the Open World
    • Generalizable perception/semantic understanding
    • Generalizable control/motion generation
    • Generalizable decision-making/reasoning/planning
    • Generalizable, multimodal task specification
    • World models for navigation
    • End-to-end approaches for navigation
  • Current Limitations of Navigation in the Open World
    • Failure modes of navigation systems
    • Failure modes of learned/foundation models
  • Handling Failures
    • Uncertainty estimation for learned/foundation models
    • Out-of-distribution detection for learned/foundation models
    • Failure detection in navigation
    • Robustness to failures and failure handling approaches
  • Datasets/Benchmarks
    • Large-scale datasets for OWN
    • Benchmarks for OWN

Submission Instructions and Important Dates:

Submissions should be 2-4 pages (not including references), following the IROS format. The submission and review process will proceed through OpenReview. We encourage authors to include videos, code, or data as supplementary material, either in a zip file or through external links.

The submission portal will open on 8th Aug 2025, and accept submissions until the paper submission deadline on 19th Sep 2025. We offer an early paper submission deadline for researchers who require a decision before the IROS early-bird registration deadline.

Important Dates (All deadlines are AoE):

  • Submission portal opens: 8th Aug 2025
  • Early paper submission deadline: 15th Aug 2025
  • Notification of acceptance (early submissions): 29th Aug 2025
  • Paper submission deadline: 19th Sep 2025
  • Notification of acceptance (regular submissions): 3rd Oct 2025
  • Camera-ready submission due date: 10th Oct 2025
  • Workshop date: 20th Oct 2025 (PM)