ICRA 2025 Workshop

Creating fully autonomous, insect-sized robots weighing less than a gram will require re-imagining nearly every element because of the small scale. Small scale implies extreme Size, Speed, Weight, and Power (SSWaP) constraints. It also implies multiple “phase transitions” due to changes in the governing physics as scale reduces, precluding many approaches that have been successful on larger robots. Nearly the whole robotics stack, including actuators, fabrication, power systems, communication, computation architectures, sensors, and control algorithms, may have to be redesigned.

This workshop draws from a broad background and is intended to touch on each of the many areas involved in full-stack robotics research (e.g., perception, intelligence, and actuation). In addition to encouraging active discussions among academic and industrial researchers, it aims to find out what are the remaining hard problems in this space, and brainstorm how they can be tackled. The format will include invited speakers, contributed papers with a short interactive presentation session, a design sprint, and a panel discussion.

The study and design of resource-constrained is inherently interdisciplinary, and the diversity in our organizer and invited participant backgrounds reflects this. A major goal of the workshop is to help build relationship and potential collaborations between participants in neighboring fields of study; we believe that these kinds of close collaborations are the primary drivers of progress in this space.

A complete hourly schedule will be posted here when the workshop agenda and invited speaker slate is finalized.

Call for Contributions

We invite paper submissions for those working on related topics to present recent results; accepted paper authors will be given the opportunity to present with short-form talks (meant to stimulate interaction and discussion) during the presentation session.

To participate, submit a two-page abstract in IEEE conference paper format (including references) by date TBD. The abstracts will be made publicly available on this workshop website (unless requested otherwise). Please note that these abstracts will not be published in the conference proceedings. The best three submissions, as judged by the organizers, will be given vouchers for free publication at npj Robotics, a new open-access robotics journal. We especially encourage junior investigators to submit their work.

Submit papers to: minster@uw.edu Subject: [ICRA 2025 Workshop Submission] Title of your paper