ICRA 2027 Workshop: Wake Up, Aerial Robotics
Location: COEX Convention & Exhibition Center, Seoul, South Korea
Overview
Are we still solving the right problems? Aerial robotics has reached a remarkable level of maturity. Autonomous navigation, agile flight, perception, control, physical interaction, and multi-robot cooperation have all achieved major advances. This success, however, creates a new scientific challenge: as platforms, methodologies, and benchmarks consolidate, research naturally becomes increasingly effective at refining familiar solutions, while potentially overlooking new problem formulations and research paradigms.
Now is a particularly timely moment for the community to question what should come next. Recent breakthroughs are already challenging long-standing conventions: generalist policies question platform-specific control; unconventional sensing challenges reliance on standard perception stacks; embodied and morphological intelligence shifts functionality from computation toward the physical system; multimodal designs blur the boundary between flying and terrestrial robots; and advancing physical interaction expands what aerial robots can do.
Wake Up, Aerial Robotics will use these developments as starting points to ask: Which established paradigms should we reconsider? Which important problems are we overlooking? Which emerging ideas could produce new capabilities over the next decade? Rather than being organized around traditional subfields, the workshop will bring together perspectives spanning learning and control, sensing, embodiment, physical interaction, multimodal locomotion, multi-robot systems, and real-world deployment.
Tentative Schedule
| Time | Program |
|---|---|
| 8:30–8:40 | Introduction — Are We Still Solving the Right Problems? |
| 8:40–9:35 | From Bespoke Skills to General-Purpose Intelligence |
| 9:35–10:30 | Rethinking How Aerial Robots Sense |
| 10:30–11:00 | Coffee Break + Poster Session (all accepted contributions) |
| 11:00–11:55 | Embodiment as Intelligence |
| 11:55–12:25 | IEEE RAS TC Best PhD Thesis Award — award presentation and invited talk by the recipient |
| 12:30–14:00 | Lunch |
| 14:00–15:10 | Beyond the Conventional Flying Machine |
| 15:10–15:40 | Coffee Break + Poster Session (continued; best-poster voting) |
| 15:40–16:20 | Industry & Startup Panel: What does aerial robotics still need? |
| 16:20–17:10 | Interactive Grand-Challenges Discussion: What should we work on next? |
| 17:10–17:30 | Synthesis, Best-Poster Award, and Closing |
| Evening | Informal Networking Gathering supported by the IEEE RAS TC |