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. SemRob 2026 will be held at RSS in Australia; we look forward to receiving your submissions and welcoming you to a vibrant discussion on semantic reasoning and goal understanding in robotics.

Speakers and Panelists

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 combine symbolic representations (e.g., scene graphs) and/or procedural reasoning strategies with learned representations
• Semantic representations for generalizable robot learning (e.g., skill representations/primitives, efficient action tokenization, constraints and pre-/post-conditions, geometric task-space primitives, object-centric representations, affordances, etc.)
• Mechanisms for online human-in-the-loop policy supervision and behavior-correction
• 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.
• Algorithms and mechanisms for test-time adaptation, policy steering, online policy guidance, etc.
• Frameworks and systems for cross-embodiment robot learning

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.

We will accept the official LaTeX or Word paper templates, provided by RSS 2026. Authors should upload their submission as a PDF file to OpenReview.

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.

Schedule

To be announced.

Organizers