Successful Workshop ‘Alignment through Purpose in Autonomous Robots’ at ICDL 2025

On September 16th, 2025, the workshop Alignment through Purpose in Autonomous Robots was successfully held at the IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL), hosted at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the Czech Technical University in Prague.

Organized by Alejandro Romero and Martín Naya within the framework of the PILLAR-Robots European project (funded by the European Union under Grant Agreement No. 101070381), the event brought together researchers from multiple disciplines: robotics, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, ethics, psychology, and cognitive science. The aim was to address the challenge of how to endow autonomous systems with purpose and ensure their learning and behaviors remain aligned with human values, social norms, and safety considerations

The workshop featured an intensive morning program of talks and case studies, where participants contributed technical, philosophical, and practical perspectives on aligning autonomous robots with human purposes.

Highlights included:

• Richard J. Duro (University of A Coruña, Spain), who addressed the alignment challenge and the integration of large language models (LLMs) to improve cultural and contextual adaptation in robots.
• Vieri Giuliano Santucci (ISTC-CNR, Italy), who presented a conceptual approach on how to guide Open-Ended Learning systems through user-defined purpose directives.
• Niki Efthymiou (National Technical University of Athens, Greece), whose talk on social robotics and engagement with human learning drew high expectations.
• Gianluca Baldassarre (ISTC-CNR, Italy), who introduced the “Purpose-Directed Open-Ended Learning (POEL)” framework, demonstrating through simulations how this approach accelerates learning and improves task performance when purpose-driven.

The workshop achieved excellent interdisciplinary participation, attracting researchers from different countries and diverse fields of expertise. It brought up a deep and constructive debate on how robots can learn human-defined purposes. The event also strengthened collaboration among institutions and attendees, laying the groundwork for future research initiatives and synergies within the PILLAR-Robots project.

In summary, the workshop was a success in both participation and outcomes, meeting expectations and reinforcing the project’s core mission: advancing autonomous robotic development guided by human purposes, with ethical, cognitive, and technical alignment.

We are delighted with the fruitful results of this workshop and look forward to seeing how they will inspire the next stages of research within PILLAR-Robots!