IROS 2026

Dates: Sep 27 – Oct 1, 2026
Place: Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Venue: David L. Lawrence Convention Center, 1000 Fort Duquesne Boulevard, Pittsburgh, PA 15222, USA
Organiser: IEEE RAS, IEEE IES, RSJ and SICE

IROS is one of the largest robotics research conferences, co-sponsored by IEEE RAS, IEEE IES, RSJ and SICE. The 2026 edition runs 27 Sep–1 Oct at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh, chaired by CMU's Howie Choset. It has more than 1,900 papers, each shown as a talk and a poster, plus 20 keynotes, 3 plenary panels, 86 workshops, 9 competitions and 170+ exhibitors.

Key facts

Papers: Over 1,900 contributed papers, each presented as both a talk and a poster, per the Program Chair's note.
Workshops: 86 workshops and tutorials: 44 on Sunday 27 Sep and 42 on Thursday 1 Oct.
Exhibits: 170+ exhibitors across 180 numbered booths in Halls A and B, with an Innovation Stage and a Tech Talk Stage for industry talks.
Competitions: 9 competitions in the Competition Area, including two that debut this year: humanoid IKEA assembly and robotic origami.
Late-breaking results: About 150 late-breaking results posters (not peer-reviewed).
Tours: 6 technical tours to CMU's Robotics Innovation Center and NREC on 1 Oct, all sold out.
Travel support: IROS-SDC travel awards of up to USD 600 each for 25 students, plus the RAS Member Support and IES-SYPA programs.

Important dates

Special session proposals: 31 January 2026 (past)
Paper submission deadline: 2 March 2026 (past)
Workshop/tutorial, competition and forum proposals: 16 March 2026 (past)
Paper acceptance notification: 16 June 2026 (past)
Final paper and author registration deadline: 16 July 2026 (past)
Early-bird registration deadline: 24 July 2026 (past)
Late-breaking results deadline: 10 August 2026 (past)
Regular registration deadline: 18 September 2026 (past)
Workshops & tutorials (day 1): 27 September 2026 (past)
Main conference: 28–30 September 2026 (past)
Workshops & tutorials (day 2) and technical tours: 1 October 2026 (past)

Registration

Fees: From USD 400 (day pass); full conference USD 460–1,565; IEEE Life Members free

Keynote speakers

Elena De Momi (Politecnico di Milano): Open Questions on the Road to Autonomous Surgery
Naomi Fitter (Oregon State University): Socially-Informed Context Awareness for Robots in Human-Populated Settings
Greg Chirikjian (Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI)): From Hyper-Redundancy to Robot Imagination and Affordance Learning
Genta Suzuki (Fujitsu): Fujitsu Kozuchi Physical OS: A Research Strategy for Scalable Physical AI
Gaurav Bansal (John Deere / Blue River): Building Autonomy for the Real World
Al Rizzi (RAI Institute): Developing Advanced Robot Capability at the RAI Institute
Yekai Sun (PaXini AI): Tokens of the Physical World: Accelerating Intelligence Emergence via Multimodal Embodied Data
He Wang (Galbot): Towards the AlphaGo and ChatGPT Moments of Embodied AI
Jen Jen Chung (University of Queensland): All data are equal, but some data are more equal than others
Yigit Menguc (Marble Wit Research Co.): Soft Robotics, Tensegrity, and the People Who Love Them.
Robin Murphy (Texas A&M University): Rethinking Disaster Robotics: The Open Questions That Matter Now
Gina Olson (University of Massachusetts Amherst): Embracing Design Complexity: A Biomimetic Approach to (Soft?) Snake Robots
Tim Bretl (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign): How you can be part of a revolution in composite manufacturing
Lael Odhner (RAI Institute): Big bets in manipulation systems: where is the frontier today?
David Held (Carnegie Mellon University): Robots That Learn After Deployment: Designing Policies for Fast Adaptation
Ankur Mehta (UCLA): Robotics problems that robotics can't solve
Brittany Duncan (University of Nebraska-Lincoln): Patterns from the Field: how contextual lessons can inform robot design
Ralph Hollis (Carnegie Mellon University): Lorentz Levitation Technology for Fine Motion Robotics, Haptic Interaction, and Vibration Isolation
Genki Yamauchi (Public Works Research Institute (PWRI)): From Big Sites to Every Site: Extending Construction Robotics to the Work Done by Hand
Nancy Pollard (Carnegie Mellon University): Keynote
Lisa Chai (Interwoven Ventures): Plenary panel: Start-ups and Entrepreneurship (Mon 28 Sep)
Henrik I. Christensen (UC San Diego): Plenary panel: Start-ups and Entrepreneurship (Mon 28 Sep)
Vijay Kumar (University of Pennsylvania): Plenary panel: Start-ups and Entrepreneurship (Mon 28 Sep)
Martina Hansen (Sudo AI): Plenary panel: Start-ups and Entrepreneurship (Mon 28 Sep)
Andrea Thomaz (Diligent Robotics): Plenary panel: Start-ups and Entrepreneurship (Mon 28 Sep)
Ali Agha (Field AI): Plenary panel: Start-ups and Entrepreneurship (Mon 28 Sep)
Sami Haddadin (MBZUAI): Plenary panel: Start-ups and Entrepreneurship (Mon 28 Sep)
Sanjiv Singh (Near Earth Autonomy): Plenary panel: Start-ups and Entrepreneurship (Mon 28 Sep)
Robert Ambrose (Texas A&M University): Plenary panel: Space (Tue 29 Sep)
Kim Hambuchen (NASA Johnson Space Center): Plenary panel: Space (Tue 29 Sep)
Ueno Hiroshi (JAXA): Plenary panel: Space (Tue 29 Sep)
Andrea Bajcsy (Carnegie Mellon University): Plenary panel: Should Robots be Generalists or Specialists? (debate, Wed 30 Sep)
Ken Goldberg (UC Berkeley): Plenary panel: Should Robots be Generalists or Specialists? (debate, Wed 30 Sep)
Georgia Chalvatzaki (Technical University of Darmstadt): Plenary panel: Should Robots be Generalists or Specialists? (debate, Wed 30 Sep)
Katerina Fragkiadaki (Carnegie Mellon University): Plenary panel: Should Robots be Generalists or Specialists? (debate, Wed 30 Sep)
Philipp Wu (xdof): Plenary panel: Should Robots be Generalists or Specialists? (debate, Wed 30 Sep)
Huazhe Xu (Tsinghua University): Plenary panel: Should Robots be Generalists or Specialists? (debate, Wed 30 Sep)
Yu Sun (IEEE T-ASE): Plenary panel: Should Robots be Generalists or Specialists? (debate, Wed 30 Sep)
Nancy Amato (UIUC): Plenary panel: Should Robots be Generalists or Specialists? (debate, Wed 30 Sep)
Matt Mason (Carnegie Mellon University): Plenary panel: Should Robots be Generalists or Specialists? (debate, Wed 30 Sep)
Toshi Fukuda (Nagoya University): Plenary panel: Should Robots be Generalists or Specialists? (debate, Wed 30 Sep)
Katsu Yamane (Path Robotics): SICE 'Robotics without Borders' luncheon seminar (title TBA), Mon 28 Sep

Workshops

Workshop on Open Robotics Software, 1 October 2026: https://sites.google.com/rice.edu/iros26-robotics-software/
Why Rust for Robotics: A Perspective From Industry, 27 September 2026: https://rust-for-robotics.github.io/iros2026/
Reproducing Robot Manipulation: Developing Guidelines to Improve Accessibility and Reproducibility of Open-Source, 27 September 2026: https://www.robot-manipulation.org/events/workshops/iros-2026
Building Scalable Infrastructure for Robot Learning: From Data Scaling to Real-World Deployment, 1 October 2026: https://scale-infra.github.io/iros2026/
Soft Robot Manufacturing and Testing Hackathon, 1 October 2026: https://sites.google.com/umass.edu/softroboticsreproducibility/iros-2026
Reproducible Benchmarking of Robotic Grasping and Manipulation: From Advanced AI to Generalized Humanoid Intelligence, 1 October 2026: https://sites.google.com/view/rgmcw2026/home-page
Physical World Models for Scaling Embodied AI, 1 October 2026: https://physical-world-models.github.io/IROS2026/
WORLDS: World Models and Spatial Intelligence for Physical AI, 27 September 2026: https://worlds-iros2026.github.io/
1st International Workshop on Industrial Applications of Robot Learning, 27 September 2026: https://aistairc.github.io/IROS2026-workshop/
Perception and Decision Making for Athletic Humanoid Robotics, 27 September 2026: https://iros-2026-athletic-humanoid.github.io/workshop/
Scaling vs. Structure: Rethinking Bimanual Manipulation Beyond Single-Arm Policies, 27 September 2026: https://bimanual-robot-learning.github.io
Sim2Real and Classical Control: From Rigorous Theory to Data-Driven Robotics, 1 October 2026: https://sim2realgap.github.io/sim2real-and-control-workshop-iros2026/
5th Workshop on Mobile Manipulation and Embodied Intelligence (MOMA.v5): Contact-Rich Mobile Manipulation for Robust Real-World Deployments, 27 September 2026: https://mobile-manipulation.net/events/moma-iros26/
Foundation Models in Multi-Robot Systems, 27 September 2026: https://zhourobotics.github.io/fm-mrs/
Scalable Tactile Sensing for Dexterous Manipulation, 27 September 2026: https://tactile-dexterity-iros.github.io/

Official links

Website: https://2026.ieee-iros.org/
Program Guide: https://2026.ieee-iros.org/program/
Keynotes: https://2026.ieee-iros.org/program/keynotes/
Workshops & Tutorials: https://2026.ieee-iros.org/program/workshops-tutorials/
Competitions: https://2026.ieee-iros.org/program/competitions/
Society events: https://2026.ieee-iros.org/program/society-events/
RAS events: https://2026.ieee-iros.org/program/ras-events/
Technical tours: https://2026.ieee-iros.org/program/technical-tours/
Registration: https://2026.ieee-iros.org/attend/registration/
Venue: https://2026.ieee-iros.org/attend/conference-venue/
Travel information: https://2026.ieee-iros.org/attend/travel-information/
Accommodations: https://2026.ieee-iros.org/attend/accommodations/
Organizing committee: https://2026.ieee-iros.org/about/organizing-committee/
Press & media: https://2026.ieee-iros.org/about/press-media/
Partnership and exhibit prospectus: https://iebms.heiexpo.com/usi/iros/iros26prospectus.pdf
X (Twitter): https://x.com/ieeeiros
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/iros2026pittsburgh