A Roadmap for Climate-Relevant Robotics Research

TL;DR

This paper provides a strategic roadmap for integrating robotics research into climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts, emphasizing interdisciplinary collaboration and application of robotics tools across various climate-related domains.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive roadmap highlighting specific climate-relevant problems suitable for robotics solutions, fostering collaboration between roboticists and climate experts.

Findings

Identifies high-impact climate applications for robotics.

Highlights opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration.

Proposes actionable research directions for climate robotics.

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.