Open Review Submission Link: Open Review

IMPORTANT DATES:

• Workshop day: Sep 27th, 2026

Camera-ready paper:
Sep 25th, 2026

Acceptance Notification:
Sep 21st, 2026

Paper Submission Deadline:
Sep 15th, 2026
Sep 5th, 2026

ABOUT:
We invite researchers to present their preliminary or ongoing projects in the area of social navigation and related fields. Submissions are welcome on a wide range of topics, including planning, human-robot interaction, and the application of foundation models to social robot navigation. Example topics include, but are not limited to:

• How to overcome the freezing robot problem in social robot navigation?
• How much does capturing human body pose, gestures, head orientation or eye gaze benefit social navigation?
• How should a robot behave in order for it to be accepted as social by humans?
• How does a robot communicate its navigation intent to humans?
• What communication modalities benefit the social robot navigation?
• How much can data-based approaches capture or imitate human behavior in social navigation?
• How can we move towards foundation models for social robot navigation?
• How to define social norms in terms of costs or rewards?
• How to accommodate diverse human factors and environmental context in social navigation?
• How do we model pedestrian and crowd behaviors?
• What metrics are suitable to measure efficiency, safety and socialness in social navigation?
• How do we trade-off efficiency and safety (socialness) in evaluating social navigation?
• How effective is it to evaluate social navigation models on datasets?
• What behavior model is suitable to model humans in social navigation simulation?
• How much realism do we need in social navigation simulation?
• How do we categorize and evaluate context in social navigation?
• How do we mitigate novelty effect in real-world social navigation experiments?
• How does combined motion and task planning benefit social robot navigation?

AUTHOR AND SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
We invite short contributions on topics mentioned above. The papers should be in 4-6 pages (excluding the references) and should be in standard IROS format. The required IEEE double column format template is available here. Submissions should not be anonymized. We encourage original submissions and welcome works currently under review. We especially encourage contributions from authors with diverse backgrounds, such as those with minority or underrepresented backgrounds or junior researchers.

Open Review Submission Link: Open Review

PUBLICATION & ATTENDANCE:
All accepted papers will be given the opportunity to be presented in the workshop as posters. Authors of select papers will be offered spotlight short presentations. The accepted papers will be posted on the workshop's website in advance so that interested participants will have a chance to view the papers first before coming to the workshop. These non-archival papers and their corresponding posters will remain available on this website after the workshop. The authors will retain copyrights of their papers.