Abstract

A central challenge in robotics is distilling complex sensor data into actionable representations for decision-making and motion planning. However, planners operating at different levels of abstraction demand representations with distinct and contradictory properties. For instance, a high-level decision-making planner requires a representation that encodes the high-level semantics and relationships between scene elements. On the other hand, a low-level trajectory optimizer requires a high-fidelity representation of occupancy to guarantee safe behavior. When robots operate in unknown or dynamic environments, the representation must support real-time construction from a stream of sensor data.

Recently, several communities have made significant progress on developing representations that have subsets of these properties. These efforts include radiance field models from the 3D vision community, rapid advances in vision-language models for semantic understanding, and continued developments in model-based RL, scene graphs, and neuro-symbolic AI. Despite each field’s progress, enabling robots to be safe and capable agents across diverse task specifications will require collaboration across these academic disciplines.

Through invited and selected spotlight talks as well as a panel discussion, the Representations for Robotic Reasoning workshop will address several key topics, including (1) designing representations that enable intelligent, efficient, and safe motion planning, (2) evaluating trade-offs among approaches such as learned world models, radiance fields, and scene graphs, (3) adapting representations to dynamic and uncertain environments, and (4) fostering cross-disciplinary collaborations. By bringing together these perspectives, the Representations for Robotic Reasoning workshop aims to encourage discussion and collaboration on the development of perceptual representations that support robust and safe robot behavior.

List of Organizers

Seth Isaacson

PhD Candidate at the University of Michigan

Ram Vasudevan

Associate Professor at the University of Michigan

Georgia Chalvatzaki

Full Professor at the Technical University of Darmstadt

Helen Olynikova

Senior Researcher at ETH Zürich

Rudolf Lioutikov

TT Professor at Karlsruher Institute of Technology

Shreyas Kousik

Assistant Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology

Katherine Skinner

Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan

Dennis Anthony

PhD Student at Georgia Institute of Technology

Paul Mattes

PhD Student at Karlsruher Institute of Technology

Max Siebenborn

PhD Student at the Technical University of Darmstadt

Accepted Papers

List of Seminars

Example Seminar II

Example Author II · Example Institution II

2014-01-02

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Example Seminar

Example Author · Example Institution

2014-01-01

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