3rd AI Meets Autonomy: Vision, Language, and Autonomous Systems Workshop
IROS 2026, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
Thursday, Oct. 1st, 8:00AM - 12:30PM
IROS 2026, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
Thursday, Oct. 1st, 8:00AM - 12:30PM
This workshop will be held in the morning of Thursday, Oct. 1, 2026 from 8:00AM - 12:30PM. Location: TBD
Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), Visual Language Models (VLMs), and other foundation models present new opportunities for robotics. The 3rd iteration of this workshop focuses on exploring the intersection of these models and robotic systems, highlighting how progress in the AI and computer vision communities can inform and accelerate robotics research. Integrating LLMs and VLMs into robotic pipelines could enable systems that are more explainable, instructable, and capable of generalizing across tasks. However, achieving seamless integration remains a significant challenge, as existing models often lack the grounded understanding required for real-world robotic applications, including knowledge of physical properties, spatial relationships, and temporal dynamics. Closer integration with robotic platforms may help address these limitations, as real-world interaction provides rich sensory observations and physical feedback that can support the development of more robust and physically grounded intelligent systems.
This workshop seeks to establish an inclusive and collaborative forum for professionals, researchers, and enthusiasts to exchange ideas, share experiences, and build connections within the AI and robotics community, with particular emphasis on supporting and connecting early-career researchers. The program will include invited talks, paper presentations, open panel discussions, networking opportunities, and presentations of exclusive results and demonstrations from the CMU Vision-Language-Autonomy Challenge. Five invited speakers will present their research, perspectives, and future directions on topics at the intersection of AI and autonomous systems, spanning areas such as datasets and benchmarks, software infrastructures, visual-language navigation, situated reasoning, robotics foundation models, and related themes.
See AI Meets Autonomy 2025, AI Meets Autonomy 2024 for the previous iterations of our workshop at IROS 2025 (Hangzhou) and IROS 2024 (Abu Dhabi).
Topics of discussion and open questions include but are not limited to the following:
Vision-Language Navigation
Semantic SLAM
Semantic Mapping
Foundation Models for Robotics
LLMs for Robotics
Human-Robot Interaction
Vision-Language-Action Models
Object-Goal Navigation
Embodied Question Answering
Spatial and Causal Reasoning
Real-Robot Autonomy Stacks
We invite paper submissions to the 3rd AI Meets Autonomy: Vision, Language, and Autonomous Systems Workshop.
This is a non-archival workshop, so both previously published papers and papers currently under review at conferences or other workshops are welcome. Submissions should follow the IROS 2026 paper format and be 4 to 8 pages in length (including references). Submissions may cover a broad range of topics, including (but not limited to) vision-language navigation, semantic SLAM and mapping, foundation models for robotics, LLMs for robotics, human-robot interaction, vision-language-action models, and related areas.
All submissions will undergo peer review. Selected outstanding papers will be invited to give a spotlight presentation at the workshop.
Submission Portal: OpenReview
Call Submission Deadline: August 20th, 2026, 23:59 AoE
Notification of Acceptance: September 3rd, 2026
Please refer to CMU VLN Challenge. The top-performing teams will have the opportunity to present their results at the workshop.
Krishna Murthy Jatavallabhula
Johns Hopkins University
Yonatan Bisk
Carnegie Mellon University
He Wang
Peking University
Bernadette Bucher
University of Michigan
Qi Wu
Adelaide University
Wenshan Wang
CMU Robotics Institute
Ji Zhang
CMU NREC & Robotics Institute
Avigyan Bhattacharya
CMU Robotics Institute
Haochen Zhang
CMU Robotics Institute
Seungchan Kim
CMU Robotics Institute
Jonas Frey
Stanford University & UC Berkeley
Fadhil Ginting
FieldAI
Chuchu Chen
George Washington University