LARS/LARC 2026 — Latin American Robotics Symposium + Competition (Bogotá)

LARS/LARC 2026 brings the Latin American Robotics Symposium (LARS) together with the Latin American Robotics Competition (LARC) at Universidad Militar Nueva Granada in Bogotá, Colombia, with the competition running 2–6 November and the symposium 4–6 November 2026. The pairing is the region's signature robotics event: a peer-reviewed, IEEE Xplore-indexed research symposium running alongside a hands-on, multi-category student competition now in its 26th edition. Together they serve roboticists, students and educators across Latin America under the umbrella of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society's regional community.

LARS: the research symposium

LARS is where Latin American robotics research is presented and published. It invites original full papers (4–6 pages, IEEE format, in English, submitted via EasyChair) as well as student posters, with accepted papers going to the LARS proceedings in IEEE Xplore. The 2026 call for papers spans an explicitly broad robotics agenda, including:

• Perception and control—vision in robotics, sensor modeling and data interpretation, sensor-motor control and active sensory processing.
• Autonomy and intelligence—planning, reasoning, learning and adaptation; self-localization, mapping and navigation (SLAM).
• Multi-robot and multi-agent cooperation, swarm and collaborative behaviours.
• Platforms across domains—mobile robots, aerial and autonomous vehicles, underwater robots, humanoids, manipulators, and bio-inspired and evolutionary robotics.
• Human–robot interaction, surgical and rehabilitation robotics, and robotics education.

That topic list maps closely onto the field's 2026 priorities, where learning-based control and embodied AI increasingly sit on top of classical perception, planning and SLAM. A dedicated student poster track lets early-career researchers gain recognition and feedback, reinforcing LARS's role as a training ground for the next generation of the region's roboticists. Because LARS is indexed in IEEE Xplore, it also gives Latin American work the international citation visibility that conferences held outside the region rarely afford to students who cannot travel far.

LARC: the competition

LARC is the practical, build-it counterpart, and its 26th edition runs over five days at Universidad Militar Nueva Granada. It fields seven university-level categories and two high-school challenges, blending established robot-soccer-style contests with regionally rooted tasks. The 2026 categories include:

• LARC OPEN and SEK—an autonomous coffee-harvesting challenge in which robots must identify and pick ripe cherries, leave unripe ones, and sort and transport the harvest, a task chosen to reflect Latin America's role as a leading coffee producer.
• VSSS (Very Small Size Soccer)—agile, fully autonomous miniature robots competing on a compact field.
• Humanoid Robot Racing (HRR)—advancing bipedal walking and running algorithms, a category launched by the IEEE RAS Latin American council in 2012.
• Line Follower and International Airship Racing (IAR)—high-speed autonomous track-following and lighter-than-air aerial robotics with constrained sensing and payload.

The mix is deliberate. Soccer-style and line-following categories give newcomers a well-documented on-ramp, while the coffee-harvesting and airship challenges push experienced teams toward open-ended perception, manipulation and autonomy problems that have no off-the-shelf solution—exactly the kind of applied difficulty that produces publishable research and employable graduates.

Who it is for and why it matters

LARS/LARC serves a dual audience: academic roboticists and graduate students publishing at LARS, and high-school and university teams—plus their mentors—competing at LARC. By co-locating rigorous research with a large student competition, the event deliberately knits together Latin America's robotics pipeline, promoting technical excellence alongside access and inclusion in STEM. The IEEE Robotics and Automation Society's regional council provides the institutional backbone, lending continuity and standards to an event that moves between host universities across the region. For 2026, hosting both in Bogotá strengthens Colombia's robotics ecosystem and gives the regional RAS community a single anchor event. The applied, locally motivated competition challenges—coffee harvesting above all—are a notable feature, grounding advanced autonomy and perception work in problems that matter to the region's economy. For Colombia in particular, hosting LARS/LARC concentrates the country's universities, student teams and robotics labs around one shared calendar fixture, the kind of recurring anchor that helps a national research community cohere.

Practical notes

Researchers should target the regular-paper, poster and tutorial submission deadlines (mid-July 2026 per the call) and follow the official site for review outcomes and registration. Competition teams should consult the per-category rule documents, which detail field dimensions, scoring and hardware constraints, and watch for the poster-submission form and Discord channels the organisers use for clarifications. Teams typically need to budget months of build-and-test time before the November event, so early engagement with the rules is essential. As an IEEE-affiliated event combining publication, competition and education, LARS/LARC 2026 is the most comprehensive robotics gathering on the Latin American calendar this year.