2025-IROS-PANASH: IROS Workshop on Perception and Navigation for Autonomous Heavy Machines in Shared Environments Hangzhou International Expo Center Hangzhou, China, October 20, 2025

Automation is rapidly advancing in off-road industries, creating an urgent need for research on autonomy in unstructured and dynamic environments. Autonomous heavy vehicles --- such as trucks, excavators, and loaders --- are transforming construction, mining, and logistics by improving safety, efficiency, and reliability. However, deploying these systems presents three major challenges: perception in harsh environments, navigation across unstructured terrains, and human-vehicle collaboration in shared workspaces. Perception systems struggle to detect and classify obstacles in harsh conditions such as fog and uneven lighting. Navigation and motion planning must address difficulties in planning safe and efficient trajectories on slippery, muddy, or uneven terrains, while considering vehicles size, weight, and limited maneuverability. As autonomous systems are often deployed alongside human-driven machines and in human-populated environments, human-vehicle collaboration in shared workspaces poses additional safety and efficiency challenges.

This workshop will bring together robotics researchers and industry experts to address these challenges, with a focus on reliable perception, adaptive motion planning, and human-aware autonomy. Unlike previous workshops that have primarily focused on urban driving, structured industrial settings, or general field robotics, this event will specifically target the challenges of autonomous off-road heavy vehicle in highly unstructured and shared environments.

This workshop aligns closely with IROS 2025’s mission to advance cutting-edge robotics research and expand the focus on autonomous heavy vehicles --- an underrepresented yet high-impact robotics domain . By integrating perspectives from academia and industry, this event will contribute to shaping future research directions and provide collaborative opportunities to accelerate the real-world deployment of autonomous heavy vehicles.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Perception systems in harsh environments
• Navigation and motion planning in unstructured terrains
• Human-vehicle collaboration in shared workspaces
• Real-time control systems for off-road vehicles
• Perception-navigation co-design for off-road autonomous vehicles
• Frameworks for testing and validation of off-road autonomous systems
• Industrial case studies and real-world deployments of autonomous heavy vehicle systems, in domains such as mining, forestry, construction, and agriculture

Submission Guidelines

Below is the submission timeline for the workshop. Authors are encouraged to prepare their manuscripts according to the deadlines listed. All submissions will be reviewed following the initial call. All submissions must be in PDF format, follow the IEEE IROS 2025 style guidelines, and not exceed 4 pages.

Committees

Speakers

• Mathew Pollayil, PhD., Researcher at YANMAR R&D;, Italy
• Michael Milford, Professor at QUT and Director of the QUT Centre for Robotics, Australia
• Martin Servin, Associate Prof. In Digital Physics at Umeå University, Sweden
• Jari Saarinen, PhD., Co-founder and CEO of GIM Robotics, Finland
• Seung-Woo Seo , Professor at Seoul National University and Director of Vehicle Intelligence Laboratory, South Korea
• Wenshan Wang ,Project Scientist Carnegie Mellon University,Pennsylvania, USA

The detailed workshop program, including speaker talks and session details, will be published on the webpage linked above.

Organizing committee

• Fatemeh Rastgar, Post-doctoral Researcher, Centre of Applied Autonomous Sensor Systems (AASS), Örebro University, Örebro, Sweden
• Todor Stoyanov, Associate Professor, Centre of Applied Autonomous Sensor Systems (AASS), Örebro University, Örebro, Sweden
• Johannes Betz , Assistant Professor, School of Engineering and Design, Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany
• Martin Magnusson , Associate Professor, Centre of Applied Autonomous Sensor Systems (AASS), Örebro University, Örebro, Sweden

Contact

If you have any questions regarding submissions, please contact us at fatemeh.rastgar@oru.se.