A Roadmap for Climate-Relevant Robotics Research

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Alan Papalia, Charles Dawson, Laurentiu L. Anton, Norhan Bayomi, Bianca Champenois, Jung-Hoon Cho, Levi Cai, Joseph DelPreto, Kristen Edwards, Bilha-Catherine Githinji, Cameron Hickert, Vindula Jayawardana, Matthew Kramer, Shreyaa Raghavan, David Russell, Shide Salimi, Jingnan Shi, Soumya Sudhakar, Yanwei Wang, Shouyi Wang et al. (8 additional authors not shown)

Published: 2025, Last Modified: 22 Apr 2026CoRR 2025EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: Climate change is one of the defining challenges of the 21st century, and many in the robotics community are looking for ways to contribute. This paper presents a roadmap for climate-relevant robotics research, identifying high-impact opportunities for collaboration between roboticists and experts across climate domains such as energy, the built environment, transportation, industry, land use, and Earth sciences. These applications include problems such as energy systems optimization, construction, precision agriculture, building envelope retrofits, autonomous trucking, and large-scale environmental monitoring. Critically, we include opportunities to apply not only physical robots but also the broader robotics toolkit - including planning, perception, control, and estimation algorithms - to climate-relevant problems. A central goal of this roadmap is to inspire new research directions and collaboration by highlighting specific, actionable problems at the intersection of robotics and climate. This work represents a collaboration between robotics researchers and domain experts in various climate disciplines, and it serves as an invitation to the robotics community to bring their expertise to bear on urgent climate priorities.