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.
