25 years of Aerial Robotics: Challenges and Opportunities Workshop at ICRA 2025

The 25 Years of Aerial Robotics: Challenges and Opportunities workshop took place on Friday, May 23, 2025, from 8:30 am to 5:30 pm in Meeting Room 410 in Atlanta. The program reflected on the field’s progress and explored future directions. See the official ICRA 2025 event page and the workshop agenda.

Schedule

Time	Program
9:00–9:10	Welcome
9:10–9:30	Introduction (Chair: Anibal Ollero) Aníbal Ollero, Giuseppe Loianno, Hyoun Jin Kim, and Kimon Valavanis — 25 years of aerial robotics
9:30–9:50	Unmanned Aerial Systems (Chair: Kimon Valavanis) Dario Floreano — Birds: the next frontier for agile and multi-modal drones
9:50–10:10	Dongjun Lee — LASDRA: A New Robotic Platform for Height Operation with Large Force and Long Operation Time
10:10–10:30	Questions and Discussion
10:30–11:00	Coffee break
11:00–11:20	Navigation and planning (Chair: Melissa Greef) Konstantinos Alexis — Resilient Navigation across Environments: Systems and Methods
11:20–11:40	Randy Beard — Continuous-time planning and estimation with applications to unmanned aircraft systems
11:40–12:00	Nicholas Roy — Hierarchy and abstractions in aerial robotics
12:00–12:20	Questions and Discussion
12:20–13:30	Lunch, sponsored by the IEEE RAS TC on Aerial Robotics and Unmanned Aerial Systems Kris Dorsey — Getting involved with Black in Robotics Sanjiv Singh — From Drones to Dragons: Scaling Aerial Autonomy Across the Fleet
13:30–13:50	Perception Based Aerial Robotics (Chair: Giuseppe Loianno) Davide Scaramuzza — Learning Autonomous Drone Racing
13:50–14:10	Soon-Jo Chung — Impact of aerial robotics research: from high-speed drones to autonomous racecars
14:10–14:20	Questions and Discussion
14:20–15:00	Oral Spotlights – Contributed Papers (listed at 14:20) Anusha Srikanthan, Hanli Zhang, Spencer Folk, Vijay Kumar, and Nikolai Matni — Quad-LCD: Layered Control Decomposition Enables Actuator-Feasible Quadrotor Trajectory Planning Lorenzo Balandi, Paolo Robuffo Giordano, and Marco Tognon — Optimization-Based Inner-Loop Control for Robust and Constraint-Safe Trajectory Tracking in Aerial Robotics Luca Morando, Sanket A. Salunkhe, Nishanth Bobbili, Jeffrey Mao, Luca Masci, Cristino de Souza, Nguyen Hung, and Giuseppe Loianno — Trajectory Planning and Control for Differentially Flat Fixed-Wing Aerial Systems Darren Chiu, Zhehui Huang, Ruohai Ge, and Gaurav S. Sukhatme — Tiny End-to-End Navigation for Quadrotor Swarms Coffee break and Poster Session (listed at 14:30)
15:00–15:20	Multi-robot systems (Chair: Marco Tognon) Angela Schoelling — Aerial swarms: from language-based interaction to safe motion plans in cluttered environments
15:20–15:40	Martin Saska — Teams of closely cooperating aerial robots: From laboratories to real-world deployment and industrial applications
15:40–15:50	Questions and Discussion
15:50–16:00	Bridging the Gap: From Lab Innovations to Real-World Applications (Chair: Giuseppe Loianno) Juraj Kabzan — From Innovation to Impact: Skydio’s Journey to Scaled Autonomous Flights
16:00–16:10	Ellen Cappo — One to (M)Any: Democratizing Autonomy at Shield AI
16:10–16:20	Rik Bouwmeester — Crazyflie and the Art of Getting Where You Meant To Go
16:20–17:00	Young researchers panel (Chair: Melissa Greef) Leonard Bauersfeld, SiQi Zhou, Nitin J. Sanket, Salua Hamaza, Margarita Chli, and Martin Saska
17:00–17:30	Meeting of the IEEE TC Aerial Robotics and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles