We invite workshop paper submissions on ideas and experimental evaluations related to open-world navigation (OWN). Accepted papers will be released on the workshop website (as non-archival publications) after the conclusion of the workshop.

Papers may be based on new and unpublished work, or may be an abstract based on prior publications. Authors whose work belongs to the former category may highlight this during submission. The organizers will strive to provide more comprehensive reviews for such papers.

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 1st Aug 2025, and continuously accept submissions until 19th Sep 2025. We offer two calls for papers, with the first closing on 15th Aug 2025. Papers submitted by the first deadline will receive a review before the IROS early bird registration deadline. The second deadline on 19th Sep 2025 is the final deadline for all paper submissions.

Important Dates (All deadlines are AoE):

  • Submission portal opens: 1st Aug 2025
  • 1st call for papers deadline: 15th Aug 2025
  • Notification of acceptance (1st call): 29th Aug 2025
  • 2nd call for papers deadline: 19th Sep 2025
  • Notification of acceptance (2nd call): 3rd Oct 2025
  • Camera-ready submission due date (1st & 2nd call): 10th Oct 2025
  • Workshop date: 20th Oct 2025 (PM)