A Roadmap for Climate-Relevant Robotics Research
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.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2507.11623,
title = {A Roadmap for Climate-Relevant Robotics Research},
author = {Alan Papalia and Charles Dawson and Laurentiu L. Anton and Norhan Magdy Bayomi and Bianca Champenois and Jung-Hoon Cho and Levi Cai and Joseph DelPreto and Kristen Edwards and Bilha-Catherine Githinji and Cameron Hickert and Vindula Jayawardana and Matthew Kramer and Shreyaa Raghavan and David Russell and Shide Salimi and Jingnan Shi and Soumya Sudhakar and Yanwei Wang and Shouyi Wang and Luca Carlone and Vijay Kumar and Daniela Rus and John E. Fernandez and Cathy Wu and George Kantor and Derek Young and Hanumant Singh},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.11623},
year = {2025}
}