The TUM Autonomous Vehicle Systems Lab is excited to be at the IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC 2026), taking place from September 15–18, 2026, in Naples, Italy! 🍕🇮🇹

This year, we are bringing a strong program to ITSC, spanning autonomous racing, learning-based planning and control, Vision-Language Models (VLMs), and autonomous driving systems. 🚗🤖

Our ITSC 2026 program includes:

📄 11 accepted papers
🎯 2 invited sessions
🏎️ 1 workshop
🎤 1 invited tutorial talk
🏆 1 Best Student Paper finalist

🏎️ Workshop

“Automated and Electrified Racing: Opportunities for Future Intelligent Vehicles”

Organized by Mattia Piccinini, Mauro Salazar, and Johannes Betz.

The workshop brings together experts from autonomous driving, vehicle dynamics, control, and motorsport to discuss how automated and electrified racing can contribute to the development of future intelligent vehicles.

Speakers: Chen Lv, Giulio Panzani, Mauro Salazar, Francesca Furia, and Francesco Biral.

📅 September 15 | 08:30–11:00
📍 Urania 2 Room

🎯 Invited Sessions

1. “Automated Vehicles at the Limits: Lessons and Opportunities from the Racetrack”

Organized by Mattia Piccinini, Mauro Salazar, and Johannes Betz, this invited session features 23 contributed papers exploring what autonomous vehicles operating at their limits can teach us about the development of future intelligent vehicles.

📅 September 16–17
📍 Calipso Room

2. “Bridging Optimal Control and Learning for Connected and Automated Vehicles”

Organized by Jianye Xu, Bassam Alrifaee, and colleagues, this session focuses on bringing together optimal control and learning-based approaches for connected and automated vehicles.

📅 September 17 | 15:00–16:00
📍 Perseide Room

📄 Papers

Our researchers will present 11 papers at ITSC 2026, covering topics from VLM-based reasoning and reinforcement learning for motion planning to autonomous racing and safety-critical autonomous driving.

🏆 Best Student Paper Finalist

1. Can VLMs Unlock Semantic Anomaly Detection? A Framework for Structured Reasoning
Roberto Brusnicki

The paper has been selected as a Best Student Paper Finalist at IEEE ITSC 2026. Congratulations! 🏆

📅 September 16 | 15:00–16:30
📍 Aula Grande Room

Further papers

2. How Well Do Vision-Language Models Understand Sequential Driving Scenes? A Sensitivity Study - Roberto Brusnicki

3. Talk to Me, Jarvis: An Open-Source Edge-Deployable Voice Assistant Framework for Autonomous Racecars - Daniel Henel

4. Learning to Sample: Reinforcement Learning-Guided Sampling for Autonomous Vehicle Motion Planning - Korbinian Moller

5. Trajectory Planning and Control Near the Limits: An Open Experimental Benchmark on the RoboRacer Platform - Mattia Piccinini

6. Control-Informed Constraint Adaptation in Minimum-Time Trajectory Planning for Autonomous Racing - Ann-Kathrin Schwehn

7. Disengagement Analysis and Field Tests of a Prototypical Open-Source Level 4 Autonomous Driving System - Marvin Seegert

8. Real-Time Minimal Risk Maneuver Planning for Autonomous Driving on Embedded Hardware - Korbinian Moller

9. A Hybrid Sampling-Based Trajectory Planner with Game-Theoretic Guidance for Autonomous Racing - Alexander Langmann

10. Benchmarking Empirical and Learning-Based Approaches for Feedforward Steering Control in Autonomous Racing - Georg Jank

11. Risk-Aware Motion Planning with Learned Trajectory Primitives and Probabilistic Safety Assessment - Marc Kaufeld

🎤 Invited Tutorial Talk

Mattia Piccinini will also give an invited talk as part of the tutorial:

“An Introduction to Autoware and Its Application Platforms”

📅 Friday, September 18 | 14:00–16:00
📍 Urania 3 Room

We are looking forward to presenting our latest research, exchanging ideas with the international intelligent transportation systems community, and meeting colleagues and collaborators in Naples.

If you are attending IEEE ITSC 2026, come by our sessions, workshop, talks, and paper presentations and meet the TUM AVS team!

See you in Naples! Ci vediamo a Napoli! 🍕🇮🇹