A Roadmap for Climate-Relevant Robotics Research

2025-07-15

AI Summary

Addressing climate change—a global grand challenge—this paper introduces the “Climate Robotics” research paradigm. It systematically integrates robotic physical platforms with core algorithmic toolchains, including planning, perception, control, and state estimation, targeting high-impact cross-domain applications across energy, buildings, transportation, industry, land use, and Earth sciences. Methodologically, it deeply couples autonomous systems technologies with climate system modeling, real-time environmental monitoring, and dynamic optimization—moving beyond traditional reliance on static observations and offline analysis. Key application directions identified include energy dispatch optimization, precision agriculture, building retrofitting for energy efficiency, autonomous low-carbon freight logistics, and wide-area ecological monitoring. The paper establishes the first structured research roadmap and interdisciplinary collaboration framework for Climate Robotics, offering both theoretical foundations and actionable pathways to advance substantive synergy between robotics and climate science. (149 words)

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Multi-Robot Systems
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Computer Vision: Vision for Robotics & Autonomous Driving

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web applications in cross-disciplinary domains and verticals such as mixed reality, smart cities, and digital health
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Research challenges in human and human-AI computation
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy

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.

Problem

• Identify high-impact robotics applications for climate challenges
• Apply robotics tools to energy, agriculture, and environmental monitoring
• Inspire new research at robotics-climate intersection

Innovation

• Robotics toolkit for climate problems
• High-impact cross-domain collaborations
• Actionable robotics-climate research directions