The IROS 2026 conference (IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems) will be held from September 27 to October 1 in Pittsburgh, USA. The program includes plenary and keynote sessions, workshops, tutorials, forums, competitions, and a debate.
- IROS 2026 se tiendra du 27 septembre au 1er octobre à Pittsburgh, aux États-Unis.
- Les keynotes ont lieu du 28 au 30 septembre, avec de nombreux intervenants reconnus.
- Des forums et tables rondes abordent le financement, l’éducation et les fondations de la robotique.
- Des ateliers, tutoriels et une formation à la communication scientifique sont également prévus.
Keynotes from September 28 to 30
The keynote sessions take place from September 28 to 30. Among the announced speakers are Elena De Momi, who will address ‘Open Questions on the Road to Autonomous Surgery’, Naomi Fitter, with ‘Socially-Informed Context Awareness for Robots in Human-Populated Settings’, and Genta Suzuki, who will present ‘Fujitsu Kozuchi Physical OS: A Research Strategy for Scalable Physical AI’. He Wang will discuss ‘AlphaGo and ChatGPT Moments of Embodied AI’.
Other researchers will speak on various topics, from soft robotics to disaster robotics. Yigit Menguc will talk about ‘Soft Robotics, Tensegrity, and the People Who Love Them’, while Robin Murphy will revisit ‘Open Questions That Matter Now’ in disaster robotics. David Held will address robots that learn after deployment, and Genki Yamauchi will discuss construction robotics applied to manual tasks. The program also includes presentations by Gaurav Bansal, Al Rizzi, Yekai Sun, Jen Jen Chung, Gina Olson, Tim Bretl, Lael Odhner, Ankur Mehta, Brittany Duncan, Ralph Hollis, and Nancy Pollard, with the presentation titles for two of them still to be confirmed.
Forums and Panel Discussions
Open to all participants, three discussion forums are scheduled for Monday, September 28 and Tuesday, September 29. Monday afternoon will be dedicated to the theme ‘US Government Funding’, Tuesday morning to ‘Robotics Education: Experiential Learning’, and Tuesday afternoon to the question ‘Is Robotics Underinvesting in Its Own Foundations?’.
Three plenary panel discussions are also scheduled. On Monday, September 28, the chosen topic is ‘Start-ups and entrepreneurship’. On Tuesday, September 29, the session will focus on space, and on Wednesday, September 30, participants will debate the following question: should robots be generalists or specialists?
Workshops, Tutorials, and Scientific Communication Training
Forty-four workshops and tutorials are planned for Sunday, September 27, and forty-two more for Thursday, October 1. Details are available on the conference’s official website, to which the program links for all events, including technical tours and competitions.
A session titled ‘Introduction to science communication’ is organized at 11 a.m. on Tuesday, September 29. It will bring together Sabine Hauert from the University of Bristol and Robohub, Ella Scallan from Robohub, and Evan Ackerman from IEEE Spectrum for a crash course in science communication.
