IROS 2026 — IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems

IROS 2026 — the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems — takes place from 27 September to 1 October 2026 at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the city the Wall Street Journal once nicknamed “Roboburgh.” Alongside ICRA, IROS is one of the two flagship robotics conferences in the world, and the premier venue where roboticists present the research that turns artificial intelligence into machines able to perceive, move and act in the physical world. It is built for robotics researchers, PhD students, robotics and controls engineers, and the industry R&D teams commercialising automation, drawing more than 7,000 participants from academia and industry worldwide.

The 2026 programme

IROS is jointly sponsored by the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society, the Robotics Society of Japan (RSJ), the Society of Instrument and Control Engineers (SICE) and the New Technology Foundation — a pairing of the world's leading robotics bodies that gives the conference its global reach and its blend of North American, European and Japanese research traditions. The peer-reviewed technical programme spans the full breadth of the discipline, and increasingly foregrounds the learning-based methods now central to it:

• Manipulation and grasping, including dexterous and bimanual systems
• Legged, wheeled and mobile robots, plus aerial systems and drones
• Perception, computer vision and SLAM (simultaneous localisation and mapping)
• Motion planning, control and optimisation
• Human–robot interaction, soft robotics, and medical and field robotics
• Autonomous vehicles and driverless-car research

Beyond the contributed-paper and poster sessions, the week is structured around a diverse slate of keynote talks — many of which pair the latest advances with a historical perspective on how the field has evolved — together with workshops and tutorials, robot competitions, and special sessions on emerging topics. A substantial industry exhibition runs in parallel, where labs and companies show hardware, sensors, simulation tools and platforms. Pittsburgh is a fitting host: a global robotics hub anchored by Carnegie Mellon University and a dense cluster of autonomy, perception and manufacturing-robotics groups, set squarely in America's industrial heartland.

Who should attend

IROS is essential for anyone doing serious work in robotics. For academic researchers and graduate students it is both the state-of-the-art record and the place to present, debate and benchmark new methods in front of the community that defines them. For robotics engineers and industry R&D groups it is a concentrated read on what is moving from the lab toward deployment — and, given the conference's reputation as a recruiting ground, a place to meet the people building the next generation of systems. The October timing also makes it an opportune event for organisations scouting summer-2027 interns. The workshops and tutorials make IROS valuable for newcomers entering subfields such as learned manipulation, legged locomotion or visual SLAM, while the breadth of the technical programme rewards cross-disciplinary browsing.

Why it matters for AI and robotics in 2026

IROS is where one of the most consequential shifts in AI is playing out: the move into embodied intelligence. The same foundation-model techniques that transformed language and vision are now reshaping robotics through vision-language-action (VLA) models, learned control policies, large-scale simulation and sim-to-real transfer, and robot foundation models trained on broad manipulation data. Humanoids and general-purpose manipulation — among the most-watched stories in AI for 2026, and the focus of enormous investment — run straight through this community. The conference's value lies precisely in its rigour: claims about embodied AI are tested here against real hardware, real perception noise and real failure modes, which is what separates a viral demo from a deployable system. Research first shown at IROS — motion planning for mobile robots, drone autonomy, object recognition and grasping — has repeatedly gone on to become standard in manufacturing, logistics and agriculture, so the conference is also a forward indicator of where commercial robotics is heading.

Attending and registration

Full details, registration, the accepted-paper list and the keynote and workshop schedule are published on the official site at 2026.ieee-iros.org. As at past IROS editions, expect tiered registration with reduced rates for IEEE and RAS members and students, and separate access for the exhibition and partner programme, which runs alongside the technical tracks. Researchers planning to present should track the conference's submission and camera-ready deadlines closely, and international attendees should allow lead time for travel and accommodation in Pittsburgh during the busy late-September window.