Autoware Workshop at the IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV 2026) (workshop code i5n85)
Important Dates
- Submission Deadline: January 30th, 2026
- Acceptance Notification: February 28th, 2026
- Camera Ready: March 15th, 2026
Contact Info
- Secretariat: iv2026@autoware.org
- Website address: https://autoware.org/iv2026
Introduction
Autoware is the world’s first open-source self-driving software built on ROS2 middleware, offering all core capabilities required for autonomous driving. More than a decade after its initial release, Autoware continues to advance education, research, and industry adoption of autonomous driving technologies. It is maintained by the Autoware Foundation (AWF), a global consortium of over 80 organizations from academia, industry, and government, jointly developing an open software and hardware ecosystem.
This workshop aims to:
- Explore state-of-the-art technologies such as advanced sensing, map-less navigation, connected vehicles, end-to-end driving, and semantic scene understanding, with pathways for integration into Autoware.
- Investigate navigation strategies for autonomous racing and their transfer to urban environments.
- Examine cooperative–competitive multi-agent systems for autonomous driving.
- Address open challenges, including adverse weather, and review emerging solutions.
The workshop engages IEEE ITS Society and IV participants while broadening the Autoware community. It provides value to newcomers seeking foundational knowledge for research and development, as well as to experts looking for the latest advancements and opportunities to contribute to an active open-source ecosystem dedicated to safer and more accessible autonomous driving.
Now in its 8th edition at IV, the workshop has been co-hosted with the symposium since its inception and continues to grow under the Autoware Centers of Excellence, with rising paper submissions each year.
Topics/Keywords:
The areas of interest of this Autoware workshop include – but are not limited to – the following:
- Open-source robotics, ROS and Autoware related projects.
- Self-driving racing and self-driving in unstructured environments and adverse weather conditions.
- New sensors for robots and self-driving vehicles.
- New algorithms for autonomous driving implemented in Autoware.
- Applications of Visual–Language–Action (VLA) models, diffusion models and semantic scene understanding for vehicles.
- Open-source driving simulation tools. Localization and Mapping: LiDAR-based, camera based, other sensor modalities.
- Map-less navigation and end-to-end planning.
- Tools and formats to support operational design domains (ODDs) for Autoware.
- Hardware support and drivers, including sensors and ECUs, for Autoware.
- Case studies and field operational tests from real-world applications using Autoware.
- Real-world self-driving deployments using state-of-the-art software and Autoware.
- Connected vehicles and open hardware vehicle platforms.
- Safety and validation in self-driving software.
- Trustworthy AI in autonomous driving.
- Applications of Autoware in robotics and self-driving vehicles education.
- Autoware use-cases for delivery, logistics, transportation, indoor/outdoor robotics.
Call for Papers and Presentations
We encourage students, researchers and the community in general to submit their papers and contribute with the 8th Autoware Workshop at IV2026. The workshop will also feature prominent speakers and contributions from the growing open-source autonomous driving. Workshop participants, no matter their respective backgrounds and expertise, will find an interesting and engaging environment for discussion of practical aspects of self-driving using Autoware as a framework, as well as to discuss related state-of-the-art methods.
The number of high quality contributed papers to the Autoware workshop has been increasing. Self-driving racing teams which participated at the recent Japan Society of Automotive Engineers (JSAE) “AI Challenge” 2025, RoboRacer racing activities ICCAS2025 (Korea), Techfest IIT 2025 (Bombay), CDC 2025 (Brazil), as well as the Autonomous Karting Series 2025 are invited to contribute several papers. Ongoing efforts aimed to improve Autoware and include state-of-the-art technologies such as BEV based perception are also welcome.
Submission Guidelines
Papers for the Autoware Workshop at IV2026 will follow the same format and requirements of IV2026 papers, namely: full-length papers up to 6 pages in the final submission, but the first submission can be up to 10 pages for technical content including figures and references. Use the official IEEE conference templates: https://www.ieee.org/conferences/publishing/templates, or use the Overleaf IEEE ITSS template from over here: https://www.overleaf.com/read/hkjvkqrgpdrf#e522c1.
After the submission, your workshop paper will be thoroughly evaluated and if accepted, please submit the camera-ready version by the deadline indicated in the table above.
* The workshop and tutorial papers will be peer-reviewed in accordance with IEEE regulations and published in IEEE Xplore as part of the IEEE IV Workshops Proceedings, which are separate from the main IEEE IV Proceedings.
Submission procedure:
1. Go to https://its.papercept.net/conferences/scripts/start.pl, locate IV 2026 and click on “Submit a contribution to IV 2026”.
2. That opens the “Submission Wizard for the 2026 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV)” page. Navigate down to the table of submission types and click “Submit” on the first submission of workshop papers.
3. In turn, that opens the “Submission Form for the 2026 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV)” page. You need to provide the information regarding your workshop paper. Notice the “Type of submission” corresponds to “Workshop paper.” Here, you need the code of the workshop. The code of the 8th Autoware Workshop at IV2026 is “i5n85” (without quotation marks).
Should you have questions regarding the submission process, please do not hesitate and contact us.
List of speakers (tentative)
Besides the speakers of the accepted papers, the Autoware workshop will include talks by members of the Autoware Centers of Excellence (CoE), including but not limited to: Rahul Mangharam, University of Pennsylvania; Rahul Razdan, Florida Polytechnic University; Jack Silberman, University of California, San Diego; Venkat Narayan Krovi, Clemson University; Alfred Chen / Joshua Garcia, University of California, Irvine; Abhijit Sarkar, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University; Alexander Carballo, Gifu University; Johannes Betz, Technical University of Munich; Junfeng Zhao, Arizona State University; Ziran Wang, Purdue University; Weisong Shi, University of Delaware; Jiaqi Ma, University of California, Los Angeles.
Schedule (tentative, times are subject to change to meet IV2026 program)
OPENING
- 8:30 – 8:40 (EDT/UTC-4): Welcome address by the 8th Autoware Workshop organizers
- 8:40 – 9:00 (EDT/UTC-4): Update from the Autoware Foundation, SPC Vice Chair, AWF
- 9:00 – 9:20 (EDT/UTC-4): “Autoware roadmap taskforce” by Muhammad Zain Khawaja, Managing Director of Product, AWF (TBC)
- 9:20 – 9:40 (EDT/UTC-4): ”Autoware achievements & future plans” by Ryohsuke Mitsudome TSC Chair, AWF (TBC)
COFFEE BREAK
- 9:40 – 10:00 (EDT/UTC-4)
IV2026 PAPERS
- 10:00 – 12:00 (EDT/UTC-4), Accepted IV2026 workshop papers’ poster session.
- (Depending on the number of papers, we may organize presentations instead)
LUNCH BREAK
- 12:00 – 13:00 (EDT/UTC-4)
Autoware Centers of Excellence (CoE) part 1 (TBC)
- 13:00 – 15:00 (EDT/UTC-4): Research updates and recent efforts using Autoware, about 15 mins per presentation
- Rahul Mangharam, University of Pennsylvania.
- Rahul Razdan, Florida Polytechnical Institute.
- Jack Silberman, University of California, San Diego.
- Venkat Narayan Krovi, Clemson University.
- Alfred Chen / Joshua Garcia, University of California, Irvine.
- Abhijit Sarkar, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
- Alexander Carballo, Gifu University.
- Johannes Betz, Technical University of Munich.
COFFEE BREAK
- 15:00 – 15:30 (EDT/UTC-4)
Autoware Centers of Excellence (CoE) part 2 (TBC)
- 15:30 – 16:30 (EDT/UTC-4): Research updates and recent efforts using Autoware, about 15 mins per presentation
- Junfeng Zhao, Arizona State University.
- Ziran Wang, Purdue University.
- Weisong Shi, University of Delaware.
- Jiaqi Ma, University of California, Los Angeles.
Autoware Foundation Industry members (TBC)
- 16:30 – 17:30 (EDT/UTC-4): Presentations by industry and government members of the Autoware Foundation.
CLOSING
- 17:30 – 17:40 (EDT/UTC-4): Closing remarks by the workshop organizers and AWF.
Organizers
- Alexander Carballo: Gifu University and Tier IV, Inc. (alex@gifu-u.ac.jp)
- Abhijit Sarkar: Virginia Tech Transportation Institute. (asarkar@vtti.vt.edu)
- Venkat Narayan Krovi: Clemson University–International Center for Automotive Research. (vkrovi@clemson.edu)
- Rahul Mangharam: University of Pennsylvania (rahulm@seas.upenn.edu )
Join us in Detroit, the birthplace of automotive excellence, where the spirit of innovation drives the future of mobility!
