iCARE Logo1st workshop on iCARE @ CoRL2025

intelligent Cobodied Assistance and Robotic Empowerment

September 27, 2025 | Seoul, Korea | Room: 3F, E9. Afternoon from 13:30 to 16:30.

About iCARE Workshop

Welcome to the 1st workshop on iCARE @ CoRL2025: Intelligent Cobodied Assistance and Robotic Empowerment.

Worldwide, over 2.5 billion people need one or more assistive tools and nearly 1 billion have no access to them. Assistive technology, involving the integration of robotics, AI, and human-centered design to empower people with diverse abilities, is fostering interdisciplinary collaboration.

The accessible and inclusive robot learning technology offers a truly life-changing potential. By providing intelligent cobodied assistance, where robots work intuitively with humans, we can open crucial doors to employment, education, and independent living for individuals with disabilities and the elderly.

From aiding to empowering, the workshop explores robotic empowerment, including surgical assistive robots, exoskeletons, AR/VR glasses, embodied/cobodied AI, multilingual agents, and driving aids.

The 1st iCARE workshop @CoRL2025 will provide a half-day session (poster, oral, invited talks) to integrate insights from assistive technology and cobodied AI into the robotics and learning community.

List of Topics

Topics of interest include but are not limited to the following:

  • VLMs for accessibility: environment/object description and user command interpretation.
  • Policy learning for assistive tasks: safe and adaptive assistive or wearable robots.
  • Lifelong and few-shot learning: rapid adaptation to new users or environments.
  • Simulation-to-Real transfer: high-fidelity simulators for assistive behavior pretraining.
  • Efficiency and portability: edge deployment under limited computational resources.
  • Wearables and sensors: smart canes, vision aids, haptic feedback and robotic integration.
  • Multimodal perception and personalization: vision, touch, speech and contextual cues.
  • Inclusive mobility and navigation: autonomy for wheelchairs and navigation aids.
  • Benchmarking and datasets: end-user-involved data collection, annotation and evaluation.
  • Formative and user study: involving end users across system development phases.
  • Human-robot interaction: easy-to-learn, easy-to-use and long-term usable systems.

Call for Papers

Authors are invited to submit papers related to the topics of iCARE workshop. Top three papers will be awarded for an oral talk.

Submission Types

  • Short Papers (max 3 pages): extended abstract, preliminary results, proof of concept, demo application, study findings.
  • Full Papers (max 8 pages): original research contributions.

Submission Instruction

  • Papers should be submitted through OpenReview iCARE workshop.
  • Acknowledgments, References, and Appendix are excluded in the page limit.
  • Papers should be formatted using the CoRL 2025 LaTeX template, available here.
  • Authors are encouraged to submit a supplementary file through OpenReview as a single zip file.
  • All submissions are anonymous and undergo a peer-review process.
  • All accepted papers will be presented in a poster session. Top three papers will be invited to present 10 minutes each in the oral session.
  • Please also check the Instruction for Authors from CoRL conference.

Other Information

  • Papers that are being submitted or are preparing to submit to other conferences are welcome.
  • Papers accepted or published by other conferences or journals are also welcome. Please indicate this clearly when submitting.
  • Submissions and review comments are not publicly available in OpenReview. Only accepted papers are publicly available.

Important Dates

  • Submission Open: 11 Jul, 2025 (UTC-0), Submit via OpenReview
  • Submission Deadline: 15 Aug, 2025 (UTC-0) 29 Aug, 2025 (UTC-0)
  • Acceptance Notification: 01 Sep, 2025 (UTC-0) 08 Sep, 2025 (UTC-0)
  • Workshop: 27 Sep, 2025

For questions, contact icare-workshop@googlegroups.com.

Schedule

The 1st iCARE workshop will be hybrid, with both in-person and virtual attendance options.

  • Date / Time: September 27th, 2025. 13:30 - 16:30
  • Venue: COEX Convention & Exhibition Center, Seoul, South Korea
  • Room: 3F, E9 room
  • Zoom meeting link: https://us05web.zoom.us/j/88929623960?pwd=XzdU7f6Uq12MYoHG5lZseHiOiP2rqC.1
TimeSessionSpeaker / Topic
13:30 - 14:00Invited Talk
Prof. Qi Wu (University of Adelaide)
Embodied Vision-and-Language Navigation
14:00 - 14:30Invited Talk
Dr. Jianlong Fu (Microsoft Research Asia)
GenRobot: Building VLA Foundation Models to Advance General-Purpose Service Robotics
14:30 - 15:00Oral Session
  • 14:30 - 14:40, "GRITS: A Guided Diffusion Policy for Robotic Food Scooping Tasks"
  • 14:40 - 14:50, "Mitigating Cross-Modal Distraction and Ensuring Geometric Feasibility via Affordance-Guided and Self-Consistent MLLMs for Task Planning in Instruction-Following Manipulation"
  • 14:50 - 15:00, "Drive As You Like: Strategy-Level Motion Planning Based on A Multi-Head Diffusion Model"
15:00 - 15:30Coffee Break
Poster Session
  • "GRITS: A Guided Diffusion Policy for Robotic Food Scooping Tasks"
  • "Mitigating Cross-Modal Distraction and Ensuring Geometric Feasibility via Affordance-Guided and Self-Consistent MLLMs for Task Planning in Instruction-Following Manipulation"
  • "Drive As You Like: Strategy-Level Motion Planning Based on A Multi-Head Diffusion Model"
  • "Manip4Care: Robotic Manipulation of Human Limbs for Solving Assistive Tasks"
  • "Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation in Assistive Navigation: A Capability-Aware Approach"
  • "Affordance-Based Disambiguation of Surgical Instructions for Collaborative Robot-Assisted Surgery"
  • "Improving performance of Affordable Robotics for Assistive Tasks"
15:30 - 16:00Invited Talk
Prof. Ahmed H. Qureshi (Purdue University)
Learning Manipulation Policies for Human Assistance
16:00 - 16:30Invited Talk
Prof. Katja Mombaur (KIT)
Optimizing Robotic Empowerment through Exoskeletons and Assistive Devices

Invited Speakers

Organizers