Dear all,

I would like to announce a new Topical Collection, "Semantic Planning and Execution of Robotic Agents in Collaborative Environments", open for submissions in *Autonomous Robots (Springer Nature)*. The Collection focuses on *semantic reasoning, planning, and robot control in open-ended and dynamic environments*, with particular attention to scenarios involving human-robot interaction and collaboration; thus, I think it can be of interest to the RoboCup community (but perhaps particularly the RoboCup@Home community).

*Scope*

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are creating new opportunities for planning and controlling robots through natural-language interaction. These developments may enable robots to operate alongside people by understanding their intentions, sharing their space, and coordinating their actions with them. At the same time, the integration of large pretrained models into robotic systems introduces important challenges related to predictability, reliability, resilience, safety, and trustworthiness. This Topical Collection invites contributions exploring the reasoning and planning capabilities required for robots to operate and collaborate with humans in real-world environments. We welcome original research articles, surveys, and perspective papers.

*Topics of interest (not limited to)*

* LLM- and VLM-based task planning and execution for HRI and HRC * LLM- and VLM-based closed-loop replanning with failure detection and failure recovery * Semantic causal task understanding * Human-aware planning in shared spaces * Adaptive behaviour in physical collaboration * Personalisation of robot behaviour to individual users * Shared autonomy * Safety, trust, and evaluation in LLM-driven human-robot interaction

The Topical Collection builds upon the successful SPACE Workshop held at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2025), but submissions are open to the entire research community.

*Guest Editors*

* /Carmela Calabrese/, Italian Institute of Technology, Italy * /Alex Mitrevski/, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden * /Zhanpeng He/, Stanford University, United States * /Shiqi Zhang/, Binghamton University, United States * /Lorenzo Natale/, Italian Institute of Technology, Italy

*Submission*

Full scope, author guidelines, and submission information: https://link.springer.com/collections/bhdghiccdi Submission deadline: *31 January, 2027*

We invite researchers working in these areas to contribute to the Collection and help advance the development of semantic, reliable, and human-aware robotic systems. We would also appreciate it if you could share this call with colleagues who may be interested.

Best regards, Alex Mitrevski on behalf of the Guest Editor team

----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr. rer. nat. Alex Mitrevski Postdoctoral researcher Email:a*****r@chalmers.se Web:https://www.chalmers.se/en/persons/alemitr https://alex-mitrevski.com/

Room 5433 Division for Systems and Control Department of Electrical Engineering Chalmers University of Technology Campus Johanneberg 412 58 Göteborg, Sweden -----------------------------------------------------------------------------