What’s coming up at #IROS2026?

The 2026 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2026) will be held from 27 September – 1 October in Pittsburgh, USA. The programme includes plenary and keynote talks, workshops, tutorials, forums, competitions, and a debate.

Keynote talks

The keynote talks will be held from 28 – 30 September:

• Elena De Momi – Open Questions on the Road to Autonomous Surgery
• Naomi Fitter – Socially-Informed Context Awareness for Robots in Human-Populated Settings
• Greg Chirikjian – From Hyper-Redundancy to Robot Imagination and Affordance Learning
• Genta Suzuki – Fujitsu Kozuchi Physical OS: A Research Strategy for Scalable Physical AI
• Gaurav Bansal – Title to be confirmed
• Al Rizzi – Developing Advanced Robot Capability at the RAI Institute
• Yekai Sun – Tokens of the Physical World: Accelerating Intelligence Emergence via Multimodal Embodied Data
• He Wang – Towards the AlphaGo and ChatGPT Moments of Embodied AI
• Jen Jen Chung – All data are equal, but some data are more equal than others
• Yigit Menguc – Soft Robotics, Tensegrity, and the People Who Love Them
• Robin Murphy – Rethinking Disaster Robotics: The Open Questions That Matter Now
• Gina Olson – Embracing Design Complexity: A Biomimetic Approach to (Soft?) Snake Robots
• Tim Bretl – How you can be part of a revolution in composite manufacturing
• Lael Odhner – Big bets in manipulation systems: where is the frontier today?
• David Held – Robots That Learn After Deployment: Designing Policies for Fast Adaptation
• Ankur Mehta – Robotics problems that robotics can’t solve
• Brittany Duncan – Patterns from the Field: how contextual lessons can inform robot design
• Ralph Hollis – Lorentz Levitation Technology for Fine Motion Robotics, Haptic Interaction, and Vibration Isolation
• Genki Yamauchi – From Big Sites to Every Site: Extending Construction Robotics to the Work Done by Hand
• Nancy Pollard – Title to be confirmed

Forums

Community discussion sessions open to all attendees, these forums will be held on Monday 28 and Tuesday 29 September.

• Monday 28 (afternoon): US Government Funding
• Tuesday 29 (morning): Robotics Education: Experiential Learning
• Tuesday 29 (afternoon): Is Robotics Underinvesting in Its Own Foundations?

Plenary panels

Three plenary panels will be held:

• Monday 28: Start-ups and entrepreneurship
• Tuesday 29: Space
• Wednesday 30: Should robots be generalists or specialists?

Workshops and tutorials

There are 44 workshops and tutorials planned for Sunday 27 September, with a further 42 scheduled for Thursday 1 October. You can find out more about these here.

Introduction to science communication

Join Sabine Hauert (University of Bristol and Robohub), Ella Scallan (Robohub), and Evan Ackerman (IEEE Spectrum) for a science communication crash course. This will take place at 11:00 on Tuesday 29 September. Find out more here.

Find out more

• Conference webpage
• Technical tours
• Competitions

Lucy Smith is Senior Managing Editor for AIhub.

Lucy Smith is Senior Managing Editor for AIhub.