Open World Navigation in the Foundation Model Era: Robustness and Failure Recovery
RSS 2026, Sydney, Australia
17th July 2026, Friday, AM Session
This workshop focuses on robust open-world navigation (OWN) in the era of foundation models. While large-scale data and foundation models have enabled impressive generalization across environments, embodiments, and scenarios, training data is bounded and such models have shown signs of brittleness, leading to failures that undermine reliable deployment. Discussions at the previous iteration of the OWN workshop clearly highlighted these and other persistent gaps in robustness and reliability when applying foundation models to navigation. Building on these insights, this second edition of the OWN workshop aims to explore these gaps by advancing our understanding of foundation models’ failure modes and exploring principled approaches to failure handling. Overall, the workshop seeks to drive a focused discussion on how to progress toward OWN with foundation models, with an emphasis on building robust, reliable, and failure-resilient systems.
In particular, this workshop aims to answer the questions:
- What role do foundation models play in building systems for open-world navigation? What capabilities do current models provide, and what missing capabilities must be developed to support open-world navigation?
- What are the key failure modes of foundation models in navigation, and how should we evaluate and address them?
- How should navigation systems handle the inevitable out-of-distribution scenarios and failures in the open world? How can uncertainty be quantified and failures handled in the context of foundation models?
- What benchmarks are needed to gauge progress in open-world navigation?
Speakers and Panelists
NaviTrace Challenge
We are accepting submissions to the NaviTrace Challenge for VLMs in navigation! Submissions will be spotlighted during a NaviTrace Challenge segment in our workshop. Please refer to the NaviTrace Challenge page for more details.
Deadline: 3rd July 2026
🏆 Challenge Prize: TBC
Time to Challenge Deadline:
Call for Videos
We are accepting short videos related to the challenges or failure modes of robot navigation systems in the open world, which we will screen during the workshop. Please refer to the Call for Videos for more details.
Deadline: 14th June 2026
🏆 Best Video Award: TBC
Call for Papers
We are accepting paper submissions related to generalization and failure handling in robot navigation. Submitted papers should be accompanied by a brief video (30-40 seconds), highlighting limitations and failure modes of the proposed approach. Please refer to the Call for Papers for more details.
Deadline: 14th June 2026
🏆 Best Paper Award: TBC
Time to Paper Deadline:
Organizers
Sponsors
