About the Workshop
Robot control has matured into a rich and diverse discipline, yet its intellectual coherence is increasingly strained by fragmentation across paradigms, application domains, and publication venues. Classical problems stability under interaction, modeling uncertainty, underactuation, hybrid dynamics, etc. are often treated as “solved” by practitioners, yet they persistently reappear in modern robotic systems operating in contact-rich, uncertain, and learning-enabled environments.
At the same time, new challenges and opportunities are emerging, ranging from unconventional robotic platforms (e.g., soft and biohybrid robots) to the growing role of machine learning and large-scale physical data. This workshop provides a focused forum to reassess which problems in robot control remain fundamentally open, how their formulation has evolved with advances in hardware, autonomy, and learning, and which challenges genuinely require new control-theoretic perspectives rather than incremental refinements. The emphasis is on conceptual clarity, modeling assumptions, and the limits of existing methods, rather than polished experimental performance.
Objectives
The objectives are threefold:
- To collectively articulate the most pressing open challenges for control in robotics, across systems, paradigms, and application domains.
- To clarify how recent technological and conceptual advances reshape both long-standing and emerging control problems.
- To strengthen intellectual cohesion across the control and robotics communities by fostering dialogue grounded in shared concepts and explicit problem formulation.
Target Audience
The workshop targets researchers in control and robotics whose work engages with the modeling, analysis, and control of complex robotic systems, particularly in settings involving physical interaction, uncertainty, hybrid behavior, and learning-enabled components. It is especially relevant for those interested in the foundations of robotics control, the limits of existing frameworks, and the formulation of new problems arising from emerging robotic platforms and technologies.
Invited Speakers
Laura Ferranti
Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
Chiara Gabellieri
University of Twente, Netherlands
Manuel Keppler
German Aerospace Center (DLR), Germany
Kyoungchul Kong
KAIST, South Korea
Alessandro Astolfi
Imperial College London, UK
Maria Pia Fanti
Politecnico di Bari, Italy
Melanie Zeilinger
ETH, Switzerland
Naira Hovakimyan
UIUC, USA
Program Schedule
| Time | Session |
|---|---|
| 09:00-09:15 | Opening and workshop framing (Organizers) |
| 09:15-10:55 | Session I - Invited perspective talks by Melanie Zeilinger, Laura Ferranti, and Chiara Gabellieri |
| 10:55-11:25 | Coffee break |
| 11:25-13:05 | Session II - Invited perspective talks by Alessandro Astolfi, Manuel Keppler, and Kyoungchul Kong |
| 13:05-14:15 | Lunch break |
| 14:15-15:55 | Session III - Invited perspective talks by Naira Hovakimyan and Maria Pia Fanti |
| 15:55-16:25 | Coffee break |
| 16:25-17:45 | Session IV - Panel with all speakers, focused on synthesizing open challenges, questioning implicit assumptions, and identifying shared research directions for robot control |
| 17:45-18:00 | Closing remarks |
Organizers
Cosimo Della Santina
TU Delft, NL - Primary Contact
Associate Professor in Robotics and Control. Research on nonlinear control, soft and underactuated robots, and physical interaction. Email: c.dellasantina@tudelft.nl
Kaoru Yamamoto
Kyushu University, JP
Associate Professor of Control, working on control methodologies that go beyond discrete-time approximations by explicitly accounting for intersample dynamics, alongside research on interconnected dynamical systems.
Manuel Keppler
German Aerospace Center - DLR, DE
Senior researcher in articulated soft and humanoid robot control, with strong links between theory and large-scale experimental platforms.
Sylvia Herbert
University of California San Diego, US
Assistant Professor working on scalable safety assurances and control policies based on available models and data about the system and environment.
Fumiya Matsuzaki
Kyushu University, Japan
PhD Student.
Yuhe Gong
University of Nottingham, UK
PhD Student.
Daniele Caradonna
Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Italy
PhD Student.
Future Outcomes
The organizers aim for the outcomes of this workshop to feed into a joint community effort, such as a position or perspective paper outlining a coherent set of open challenges in robot control. This document would serve as a reference point for future research and discussion within the control and robotics communities.