About / Inclusion rules
how the index works.
Space Robots Papers collects research where robotics or AI meets space, presents each paper as a clean, readable page, and publishes weekly picks for the Space Robots community. It is deliberately narrow: general robotics or AI work with no space angle is left out.
What gets in
- A real space connection. The paper is about spacecraft, orbital operations, the Moon, Mars, small bodies or other space systems, in its title and abstract. Phrases like “state space” or “latent space” don’t count.
- Robotics or AI. The work involves robots (rovers, manipulators, free-flyers, docking…) or AI (learning, autonomy, foundation models…), or both.
- Out of scope. Earth-observation, weather or GNSS applications of satellite data, pure astrophysics, and AI applied only to astronomical datasets, unless the paper is about the space system itself.
Index at a glance
3,639
Space × Robotics
1,013
Space × AI
881
Space × Robotics × AI
5,533 papers in total · snapshot updated 04 Nov 2026 04:43 UTC.
Mission area
Where the work happens. A paper can have up to three areas, or none when no area clearly fits.
Rover autonomy and navigation, localization/SLAM, path planning, locomotion (wheels, legs, spherical, jumping), aerial rotorcraft, caves and subsurface, field analogue tests.
Excavation and regolith handling, sampling and drilling, sample transfer, lunar infrastructure, cargo offloading.
Space manipulators, free-flyers and intra-vehicular robots, rendezvous/proximity ops/docking, capture of tumbling targets, relative navigation, spacecraft GNC and onboard autonomy.
On-orbit servicing and refuelling, active debris removal, in-space assembly and manufacturing, standard interfaces, modularity.
Agency and national programs, mission plans and architectures, budgets, policy, solicitations and calls: exploration roadmaps, architecture studies, program milestones, budget and policy decisions, RFIs and NIAC-type calls.
1,052 papers have no mission area.
Technique
How the work is done, up to three per paper. Tags come from the subject labels the sources assign (arXiv categories, OpenAlex topics, NASA NTRS subjects) and, when those are silent, from the title and abstract.
T1Manipulation & Grasping
855 →Space manipulators, grappling and capture, end-effectors, contact dynamics, sampling and drilling.
T2Surface Mobility & Terramechanics
888 →Wheel-soil interaction, slip and sinkage, legged, hopping and climbing robots, traversability, rotorcraft, caves.
T3Microgravity Mobility & Free-Flyers
261 →Free-flying and free-floating robots, Astrobee, Int-Ball, intra-vehicular robots, small-body mobility.
T4Rendezvous, Proximity Ops & Docking
865 →RPO, docking and berthing, relative navigation, non-cooperative and tumbling targets.
T5Perception & State Estimation
1,193 →Pose estimation, SLAM, odometry, lidar and stereo, event cameras, crater detection, sensor fusion.
T6Motion Planning & Navigation
644 →Path, motion and trajectory planning, obstacle and collision avoidance, autonomous navigation, exploration.
T7Guidance, Dynamics & Control
1,224 →MPC, sliding-mode and adaptive control, trajectory optimization, attitude control, impedance control, CBFs.
T8Learning-based Methods
1,320 →Reinforcement and imitation learning, deep networks, sim-to-real, diffusion policies, domain adaptation.
T9Foundation Models & LLMs
89 →Large language models, vision-language(-action) models, foundation models, generative AI.
T10Autonomy, Task Planning & Operations
486 →Onboard autonomy, mission and task planning, scheduling, FDIR and anomaly detection, behavior trees, V&V.
T11HRI & Teleoperation
519 →Teleoperation under time delay, haptics, shared and supervised autonomy, crew assistance, exoskeletons, AR/VR.
T12Multi-Robot & Swarms
366 →Multi-robot and multi-agent systems, swarms, robot teams, task allocation, formations, decentralized control.
T13Simulation, Digital Twins & Benchmarks
416 →Simulators, digital twins, hardware-in-the-loop, air-bearing testbeds, analogue sites, datasets and benchmarks.
T14Design, Mechanisms & Hardware
552 →Mechanisms and actuators, modular and soft robots, deployables, avionics, FPGAs and radiation-tolerant computing.
Venues
Where a paper was published or accepted. Papers that are only on arXiv are shown as Preprint.
Space robotics & aerospace
- iSpaRo160
- i-SAIRAS16
- ASTRA15
- IEEE Aerospace363
- IAC61
- AIAA SciTech175
- AIAA SPACE / ASCEND202
- SMC-IT/SCC46
- IEEE SPACE27
- ASCE Earth & Space44
- SmallSat25
- AMOS15
- SpaceOps38
- AAS GN&C39
- AAS/AIAA Astrodynamics45
- AAS/AIAA Space Flight Mechanics18
- ICES31
- Aerospace Mechanisms14
- 4S Symposium5
- COSPAR5
- Space Resources Roundtable5
- NASA Technical Report75
- LPSC45
Robotics
- ICRA174
- IROS162
- RSS9
- CoRL3
- Humanoids6
- FSR0
- CASE11
- AIM12
- ROBIO23
- SII8
- Robomec31
AI & ML
- IEEE CAI5
- AAAI10
- NeurIPS4
- ICML1
- ICLR1
- CVPR2
- ICCV / ECCV10
- IJCAI5
- ICAPS7
- IGARSS6
Workshops
- Space Robotics Workshop12
- Sustainable Space Robotics0
- ICRA Workshop6
- IROS Workshop0
- RSS Workshop1
- Humanoids Workshop0
- CoRL Workshop0
- NeurIPS Workshop7
- ICML Workshop1
- AAAI Workshop2
- ICLR Workshop2
- CVPR Workshop13
- iSpaRo Workshop2
Journals
- RA-L40
- T-RO5
- IJRR10
- Industrial Robot2
- Science Robotics9
- JFR / Field Robotics41
- RAS2
- Autonomous Robots2
- Frontiers RAI13
- Acta Astronautica60
- Adv. Space Res.23
- JGCD38
- JSR39
- JAIS13
- IEEE TAES52
- Aerospace (MDPI)32
- PSJ10
- Icarus10
- Remote Sensing30
- Sensors8
- Space Sci. & Tech.21
- J. Space Safety Eng.5
- Astrodynamics5
- Int. J. Aerosp. Eng.10
- CEAS Space J.5
- Front. Space Technol.7
- Chin. J. Aeronaut.11
- IFAC34
- IEEE Access18
- Applied Sciences11
- T-Mech9
- J. Astronaut. Sci.6
Sources
- Papers published since 2010, from arXiv, OpenAlex and the NASA Technical Reports Server, updated daily.
- Classics: a short hand-picked list of foundational papers, included regardless of year.