Resilient SLAM in Challenging Settings - ECMR 2025

About

This workshop is a full-day event held in conjunction with the European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR) 2025.

Resilient SLAM in Challenging Settings: Recent Advancements, Open Problems, and Competitions

Despite decades of SLAM research, real-world deployment remains challenging, especially in perceptually degraded or structurally complex environments. This workshop aims to unite researchers across Europe to address SLAM robustness in such conditions. Topics include radar-visual-inertial fusion, low-cost sensor configurations, resilience to sensor dropouts, and architectural designs for long-term autonomy. A key goal is fostering discussion on robust SLAM backends, adaptive fusion strategies, and benchmarking under degenerative conditions.

The workshop hosts:

A SLAM competition to evaluate new methods on real datasets collected with quadruped and wheeled robots using diverse sensors.
A call for papers to discuss late-breaking results and novel ideas about SLAM.

The workshop will feature invited talks, a World Café-style discussion, poster sessions, oral presentations of contributions sent to the call for papers, and the results of the SLAM competition.

Important Dates

Paper submission deadline: August 20, 2025
Competition deadline: August 28, 2025
Notification of acceptance: August 28, 2025
Workshop Day: September 2, 2025

Competition 🏆

The workshop hosts a SLAM benchmarking competition featuring datasets with radar, multispectral imagery (NDVI, thermal), and low-cost sensors on both quadruped and wheeled robots.

Evaluation

Submissions will be evaluated based on the following metrics:

Absolute Trajectory Error (ATE)
Relative Pose Error (RPE)
Dockerized ROS pipelines will be evaluated via the CodaBench platform.
- Evaluation code is available on GitHub: comrob/slam-bench

Datasets

Participants will have access to the following datasets:

An outdoor dataset in forest, tunnel, and alpine environments with radar and GNSS.
comrob/CRL25DEG_dataset
An indoor dataset from a quadruped robot with RGB-D and motion capture ground truth.
aislabunimi/IAS_IRIM_AIS_dataset
The Viking Hill Radar Dataset.
kubelvla/viking_hill_tall_grass

Training datasets will be released approximately three months before the workshop. The testing data will remain hidden and used for final evaluation after the submission deadline.

The official competition website is under construction. In the meantime, you can test your SLAM system on the training portions of the datasets using the links above.

Participation in the SLAM competition is open to online submission, and attendance at the ECMR workshop in Padova is not mandatory for submitting your work.

Call for Papers

We invite submissions of novel contributions aligned with (but not limited to) the following indicative topics:

SLAM under perceptual degradation and degenerative scenarios
Radar-based SLAM and radar-visual-inertial fusion
Passive and low-cost sensor fusion for localization and mapping
Architectures for failure resilience and sensor dropout handling
Robust back-end optimization and front-end perception
Coupling strategies in multi-sensor SLAM pipelines
Benchmarks, datasets, and evaluation metrics for degraded environments

Late-breaking results are welcome, as well as extended contributions related to ECMR submissions.

In addition to the main paper track, we are hosting an exciting SLAM competition. This is a great opportunity to test your algorithms on challenging datasets, including scenarios with degenerative LiDAR, low-cost sensors on quadrupeds, and radar in forest environments.

While we encourage competition participants to submit an accompanying paper describing their system, this is entirely voluntary. You are free to submit a paper without competing, or compete without submitting a paper. You can find all the details and access the training data in the Competition Section.

Guide for Authors

Please submit an extended abstract (up to 4 pages, including references) in IEEE conference format to the workshop chairs at: 📧 robotmappingws@gmail.com

Submissions can include re-elaborations of recently published work. The workshop will not have archival proceedings, and all submissions will be peer-reviewed by the organizing committee based on quality, relevance, and timeliness.

Publication and Dissemination

Accepted papers will be presented during the poster session at the workshop, held in conjunction with ECMR 2025 in Padova, Italy. After the event, the posters and accompanying papers will be made available on the workshop's official website.

Submit Your Paper