About
Semantic understanding of the world is essential for robots to make safe and informed decisions, adapt to changing environmental conditions, and interact effectively with other agents. In pursuit of semantic understanding, agents must be able to (i) interpret and represent high-level goals, agnostic of their physical embodiment and robust to distracting aspects of their environments; they must be able to (ii) reason, i.e., to extract abstract concepts from observations in the real-world, logically manipulate these concepts, and leverage the results for inference on downstream tasks; and they must be able to (iii) ground their own behavior on situation-appropriate actions, thus reconciling the abstract goals with what is physically feasible.

This workshop aims to foster discussion on how semantic mechanisms enable more robust, generalizable robot intelligence.

Intended audience. This workshop targets engineers, researchers, and practitioners interested in deploying semantics-aware, generalizable robots in unstructured, dynamic real-world environments. We aim to spark interdisciplinary collaboration and discussion that advances semantic reasoning in robotics. Presenters, panelists, and the technical program committee represent: Robot Learning, Embodied AI, Planning & Controls, Cognitive Robotics, Neuro-Symbolic AI, Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, and Multimodal Machine Learning.

Speakers and Panelists

Schedule

Time
07:55		Organizers Introductory Remarks
08:00		Keynote 1: Jean Oh Title TBD Abstract Abstract TBD
08:20		Keynote 2: Georgia Chalvatzaki Title TBD Abstract Abstract TBD
08:40		Keynote 3: Abhishek Gupta Title TBD Abstract Abstract TBD
09:00		Oral Talks
09:20		Coffee Break (+ Poster Session) Abstract Abstract TBD
10:00		Keynote 4: Ranjay Krishna Title TBD Abstract Abstract TBD
10:20		Keynote 5: Andreea Bobu Title TBD Abstract Abstract TBD
10:40		Keynote 6: Animesh Garg Title TBD Abstract Abstract TBD
11:00		Debate (all speakers) - What semantics *must* the data capture for efficient robot learning, and how important is direct human input in generating and curating that data?
12:00		Organizers Closing Remarks

Call for Papers

Targeted Topics

In addition to the RSS subject areas, we especially invite paper submissions on various topics, including (but not limited to):

• Hybrid architectures that integrate learned representations with symbolic representations (e.g., scene graphs) or procedural reasoning strategies
• Semantic representations for generalizable policy learning (e.g., skill learning, action tokenization, learning with constraints)
• Neural and external memory mechanisms for storing and retrieving experience
• Meta-cognitive processes (chain-of-thought reasoning, self-critiquing, uncertainty monitoring/calibration, agentic reasoning structures, etc.)
• World dynamics models for synthetic data generation, policy training, etc.

Submission Guidelines

RSS SemRob 2026 suggests 4+N or 8+N paper length formats — i.e., 4 or 8 pages of main content with unlimited additional pages for references, appendices, etc. However, like RSS 2026, we impose no strict page length requirements on submissions; we trust that authors will recognize that respecting reviewers’ time is helpful to the evaluation of their work.

Submissions are handled through OpenReview: https://openreview.net/group?id=roboticsfoundation.org/RSS/2026/Workshop/SemRob. Authors should upload their submission as a PDF.

We will accept the official LaTeX or Word paper templates, provided by RSS 2026.

Our review process will be double-blind, following the RSS paper submission policy for Science/Systems papers.

All accepted papers will be invited for poster presentations; the highest-rated papers, according to the Technical Program Committee, will be given spotlight presentations. Accepted papers will be made available online on this workshop website as non-archival reports, allowing authors to also submit their works to future conferences or journals. We will highlight the Best Paper Award during the closing remarks at the workshop event.

Important Dates

• Submission deadline: 8 June 2026, 23:59 AOE.
• Author Notifications: 24 June 2026.
• Camera Ready: 1 July 2026, 23:59 AOE (firm).
• Workshop: 17 July 2026, time pending.

Organizers