1. Abstract
This workshop will bring together leading researchers and industry practitioners to explore the growing role of robotics in the maritime industry. We will focus on the full lifecycle of a ship, from its initial construction and assembly to its ongoing maintenance and eventual recycling. The event will cover recent advancements in robotic perception, manipulation, and autonomous systems for large-scale, unstructured environments. Key topics include automated welding, non-destructive inspection, hull cleaning, and the safe and efficient dismantling of ships. The workshop aims to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue, bridging the gap between field robotics, industrial automation, and marine engineering communities.
2. Content & Relevance
The shipbuilding and maritime industries are vital to the global economy but face significant challenges, including labor shortages, safety risks in hazardous environments, and the need to improve efficiency and sustainability. Robotics offers transformative solutions for these challenges. This workshop is highly relevant to the ICRA community as it applies core robotics principles—such as robust navigation in unstructured environments, large-scale mobile manipulation, and human-robot collaboration—to a novel and high-impact domain. While workshops at earlier ICRA conferences have focused on construction and field robotics; shipbuilding, maintenance, and recycling are novel and less-explored areas at the conference. This makes it an attractive and unique topic for a workshop. The theme of the ICRA 2026 conference is "Robots for All," which highlights the growing role of autonomous systems in various sectors. A workshop on this topic aligns perfectly with this theme, as it applies robotics to an industry that hasn't experienced widespread automation. By bringing together experts from various sub-disciplines, we will create a platform to address the unique technical hurdles and foster a new research community dedicated to this field.
Duration:
Full day
Title:
Robotics for the Construction, Maintenance, and Recycling of Ships
Organizers:
• Name: Assoc. Prof. Evren Samur (Primary Contact Person)
• Affiliation: Bogazici University, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, Türkiye
• Email: evren.samur@bogazici.edu.tr
• Website/URL: https://haptics.bogazici.edu.tr/
• Name: Ekin Sakin
• Affiliation: NGO Shipbreaking Platform
• Email: ekin@shipbreakingplatform.org
• Website/URL: https://shipbreakingplatform.org/
• Name: Prof. Zoe Doulgeri
• Affiliation: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
• Email: doulgeri@ece.auth.gr
• Website/URL: https://arl.ee.auth.gr/people/doulgeri
• Name: Prof. Burkhard Corves
• Affiliation: RWTH Aachen University
• Email: corves@igmr.rwth-aachen.de
• Website/URL: https://www.igmr.rwth-aachen.de/go/id/jkhpl/
• Name: Dr. Taufik Akbar Sitompul
• Affiliation: Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway
• Email: taufik.a.sitompul@ntnu.no
• Website/URL: https://www.ntnu.edu/shorecontrol
• Name: Assoc. Prof. Ahmed Kedir Mohammed
• Affiliation: SINTEF, Norway
• Email: ahmed.mohammed@sintef.no
• Website/URL: https://www.sintef.no/alle-ansatte/ansatt/ahmed.mohammed/
• Name: Prof. Erdal Kayacan
• Affiliation: Paderborn University
• Email: erdal.kayacan@uni-paderborn.de
• Website/URL: https://en.ei.uni-paderborn.de/rat
• Name: Prof. Santiago Tapia
• Affiliation: UPM, Madrid
• Email: santiago.tapia@upm.es
• Website/URL: https://cvar-upm.github.io/
