GRASP Laboratory at ICRA 2026

Winner!
Best Paper Award
on Planning and Control
AND
Best Conference Paper Award

SymSkill: Symbol and Skill Co-Invention for Data-Efficient and Reactive Long-Horizon Manipulation

Yifei Shao, Yuchen Zheng, Sunan Sun, Pratik Chaudhari, Vijay Kumar, and Nadia Figueroa

Finalist
Best Paper Award
on Robot Manipulation
and Locomotion

Push Anything: Single and Multi-Object Pushing from First Sight with Contact-Implicit MPC

Hien Bui, Yufeiyang Gao, Haoran Yang, Eric Cui, Siddhant Mody, Brian Acosta, Thomas Stephen Felix, Bibit Bianchini, and Michael Posa

ICRA 2026 Awards

ICRA 2026 Awards Lunch

T-RO Distinguished Service Award: Mark Yim

Arts in Robotics
Accepted Proposal

CHORD: Deterministic Virtuosity in Anthropomorphic Robotic Piano

Pragya Singh

ICRA 2026
Program Chairs

Co-Chair: M. Ani Hsieh

9:00 AM to 5:30 PM

Workshop: CR2@ICRA2026: Workshop on the Path Towards Generalizable Contact-Rich Robotics: Control and Representation

Workshop organizers: Grey Sarmiento, Michael Posa

Accepted poster: Plasticity is Friction: Towards Controlling Deformables with Contact-Implicit MPC

Authors: Bibit Bianchini and Michael Posa

Accepted poster: Uncertainty-Aware Contact-Implicit MPC via GPU-Parallelized ADMM

Authors: Herbert Wright and Michael Posa

9:00 AM to 5:30 PM

Workshop: Act to Sense to Act Better: 1st Workshop on Learning and Representations for Active Perception in Manipulation

Accepted poster: Active Tactile Pose and Shape Estimation of Highly Dynamic Objects

Authors: Ethan Gordon and Michael Posa

11:35 AM to 12:15 PM

Workshop: The Good Reviewer: Shaping Up Peer-Review in the Robotics Community

Panel III: Double Blind / Social Media / AC, IROS-ICRA Transfer, Community Engagement

Panelist: Nadia Figueroa

1:30 PM to 2:30 PM

Workshop: CR2@ICRA2026: Workshop on the Path Towards Generalizable Contact-Rich Robotics: Control and Representation

Panel 2: Algorithms for Contact-Rich Control

Panelist: Bibit Bianchini

2:30 PM to 3:30 PM

Workshop: CR2@ICRA2026: Workshop on the Path Towards Generalizable Contact-Rich Robotics: Control and Representation

Spotlight talks: Control

Components of Contact: An Analysis of Contact-Implicit Control Strategies on Manipulation Primitives

Authors: Grey Sarmiento and Michael Posa

2:40 PM to 3:30 PM

Workshop: 2nd Workshop on Robot Ethics – Ethical, Legal and User Perspectives in Robotics and Automation (WOROBET)

Session 3: Contributed presentation

REBAR: Reference Ethical Benchmark for Autonomy Readiness

Authors: Jonathan Diller, David Barnes (David Barnes, LLC), Rebekah Bogdanoff (Duality Robotics, Inc.), Rhett Collier (Duality Robotics, Inc), Roddy Collins (Kitware, Inc.), Keith Fieldhouse (Kitware, Inc.), Yonatan Gefen (Kitware, Inc.), Cameron Johnson (Kitware, Inc.), Anuriha Kodali, Brad Kriel (Duality Robotics, Inc.), Varun Murali (Texas A&M University), James Niehaus (Charles River Analytics), Mish Sukharev (Duality Robotics, Inc.), Joseph VanPelt (Kitware, Inc.), Anthony Hoogs (Kitware, Inc.), Vijay Kumar, and Arslan Basharat (Kitware, Inc.)

9:00 AM to 10:30 AM

Interactive Session 1

SplatCtrl: Perception–Action Coupling Via Gaussian Scene Representations and Reactive Robot Control

Authors: Siddharth Jain (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL)), and Ho Jin Choi

9:00 AM to 10:30 AM

Interactive Session 1

Preventing Robotic Jailbreaking Via Multimodal Domain Adaptation

Francesco Marchiori (University of Padova), Rohan Sinha (Stanford University), Christopher George Agia (Stanford University), Alexander Robey, George J. Pappas, Mauro Conti (University of Padova), and Marco Pavone (Stanford University)

9:00 AM to 10:30 AM

Interactive Session 1

Approximating Global Contact-Implicit MPC Via Sampling and Local Complementarity

Sharanya Venkatesh, Bibit Bianchini, Alp Aydinoglu, William Yang (Amazon Robotics), and Michael Posa

11:50 AM to 12:00 PM

Grasping and Manipulation

Robust Bayesian Scene Reconstruction with Retrieval-Augmented Priors for Precise Grasping and Planning

Herbert Wright, Weiming Zhi (The University of Sydney, Vanderbilt University), Martin Matak (University of Utah), Matthew Johnson-Roberson (Carnegie Mellon University), and Tucker Hermans (University of Utah)

12:30 PM to 2:00 PM

RAS-Women in Engineering Lunch

Co-organizer and Chair: Nadia Figueroa

3:00 PM to 4:30 PM

Interactive Session 2

Scalable Multi Agent Diffusion Policies for Coverage Control

Frederic Vatnsdal, Romina Garcia Camargo, Saurav Agarwal, and Alejandro Ribeiro

3:00 PM to 4:30 PM

Interactive Session 2

Viability-Preserving Passive Torque Control

Zizhe Zhang, Yicong Wang, Zhiquan Zhang (University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign), Tianyu Li, and Nadia Figueroa

3:00 PM to 4:30 PM

Interactive Session 2

SIT-LMPC: Safe Information-Theoretic Learning Model Predictive Control for Iterative Tasks

Zirui Zang, Ahmad Amine, Nick-Marios Kokolakis, Truong Xuan Nghiem, Ugo Rosolia (Caltech), and Rahul Mangharam

9:00 AM to 10:30 AM

Interactive Session 3

Active Tactile Exploration for Rigid Body Pose and Shape Estimation

Ethan Gordon, Bruke Baraki, Hien Bui, and Michael Posa

9:00 AM to 10:30 AM

Interactive Session 3

Agile Flight Emerges from Multi-Agent Competitive Racing

Vineet Pasumarti, Lorenzo Bianchi (University of Rome Tor Vergata), and Antonio Loquercio

9:00 AM to 10:30 AM

Interactive Session 3

Multistability Enabled Passive Multiplexing in an N-DOF, Underactuated Hyper-Redundant Robot

Cole Nagata, Jordan Raney, and Mark Yim

9:00 AM to 10:30 AM

Interactive Session 3

PKF: Probabilistic Data Association Kalman Filter for Multi-Object Tracking

Hanwen Cao (University of California, San Diego), George J. Pappas, and Nikolay Atasanov (University of California, San Diego)

9:00 AM to 10:30 AM

Interactive Session 3

RT-GuIDE: Real-Time Gaussian Splatting for Information-Driven Exploration

Yuezhan Tao, Dexter Ong, Varun Murali (Texas A&M University), Igor Spasojevic (University of California, Riverside), Pratik Chaudhari, and Vijay Kumar

9:00 AM to 10:30 AM

Interactive Session 3

LPAC: Learnable Perception-Action-Communication Loops with Applications to Coverage Control

Saurav Agarwal (Indian Institute of Technology Bombay), Ramya Muthukrishnan (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Walker Gosrich, Vijay Kumar, and Alejandro Ribeiro

11:00 AM to 12:30 PM

Award Finalists 3

Co-Chair: Michael Posa

11:40 AM to 11:50 AM

Award Finalists 3

Push Anything: Single and Multi-Object Pushing from First Sight with Contact-Implicit MPC

Hien Bui, Yufeiyang Gao, Haoran Yang, Eric Cui, Siddhant Mody, Brian Acosta, Thomas Stephen Felix, Bibit Bianchini, and Michael Posa

12:10 PM to 12:20 PM

Field and Service Robotics

Air-Ground Collaboration for Language-Specified Missions in Unknown Environments (I)

Fernando Cladera, Zachary Ravichandran, Jason Hughes, Varun Murali (Texas A&M University), Carlos Nieto-Granda (DEVCOM U.S. Army Research Laboratory), M. Ani Hsieh, George J. Pappas, Camillo J. Taylor, and Vijay Kumar

3:00 PM to 4:30 PM

Interactive Session 4

Multi-Robot Multi-Source Localization in Complex Flows with Physics-Preserving Environment Models

Benjamin Shaffer, Victoria Edwards (College of the Atlantic), Brooks Kinch, Nathaniel Trask, and M. Ani Hsieh

3:00 PM to 4:30 PM

Interactive Session 4

Real-Time Glass Detection and Reprojection Using Sensor Fusion Onboard Aerial Robots

Malakhi Hopkins, Varun Murali (Texas A&M University), Vijay Kumar, and Camillo J. Taylor

3:00 PM to 4:30 PM

Interactive Session 4

Flow with the Force Field: Learning 3D Compliant Flow Matching Policies from Force and Demonstration-Guided Simulation Data

Tianyu Li, Yihan Li, Zizhe Zhang, and Nadia Figueroa

3:00 PM to 4:30 PM

Panel 4 – Publish or Perish: Surviving the Paper Deluge – Is AI the solution? If not, what is the Solution?

Moderator: Aude Billard (EPFL)

Panelists: Renaud Detry (KU Leuven), Greg Dudek (McGill University), Nadia Figueroa, Dongheui Lee (TUM), Shigeki Sugano (Waseda University), and Kunpeng Yao (University of Leeds)

5:55 PM to 6:05 PM

Award Finalists 4

SymSkill: Symbol and Skill Co-Invention for Data-Efficient and Reactive Long-Horizon Manipulation

Yifei Shao, Yuchen Zheng, Sunan Sun, Pratik Chaudhari, Vijay Kumar, and Nadia Figueroa

9:00 AM to 10:30 AM

Interactive Session 5

Towards Optimizing a Convex Cover of Collision-Free Space for Trajectory Generation

Yuwei Wu, Igor Spasojevic (University of California, Riverside), Pratik Chaudhari, and Vijay Kumar

9:00 AM to 10:30 AM

Interactive Session 5

Active Learning Design: Modeling Force Output for Axisymmetric Soft Pneumatic Actuators

Gregory Campbell (Lafayette College), Gentian Muhaxheri (Syracuse University), Leonardo Ferreira Guilhoto, Christian Santangelo (Syracuse University), Paris Perdikaris, James Pikul (University of Wisconsin-Madison), and Mark Yim

12:30 PM to 2:00 PM

ICRA 2026 Awards Lunch

T-RO Distinguished Service Award: Mark Yim

3:00 PM to 4:30 PM

Interactive Session 6

Occupancy-Aware Trajectory Planning for Autonomous Valet Parking in Uncertain Dynamic Environments

Farhad Nawaz Savvas Sadiq Ali, Faizan M. Tariq (Honda Research Institute, USA), Sangjae Bae (Honda Research Institute, USA), David Isele (University of Pennsylvania, Honda Research Institute, USA), Avinash Singh (Honda Research Institute, USA), Nadia Figueroa, Nikolai Matni, Jovin D’sa (Honda Research Institute, USA)

3:00 PM to 4:30 PM

Interactive Session 6

Active Next-Best-View Optimization for Risk-Averse Path Planning

Amirhossein Mollaei Khass (Lehigh University), Guangyi Liu (Amazon), Vivek Pandey (Lehigh University), Wen Jiang, Boshu Lei, Kostas Daniilidis, and Nader Motee (Lehigh University)

3:00 PM to 4:30 PM

Interactive Session 6

Long-Term Mapping of the Douro River Plume with Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Nicolo Dal Fabbro, Milad Mesbahi, Mendes Renato, Joǎo Sousa (Universidade Porto), and George J. Pappas

4:45 PM to 6:15 PM

Robot Learning II

Chair: Antonio Loquercio

5:15 PM to 5:25 PM

Robot Learning II

Deep Sensorimotor Control by Imitating Predictive Models of Human Motion

Himanshu Guarav Singh (University of California, Berkeley), Pieter Abbeel (University of California, Berkeley), Jitendra Malik (University of California, Berkeley), and Antonio Loquercio

8:30 AM to 5:30 PM

Workshop: Beyond Teleoperation: Learning from Diverse Human and Simulation Data

Workshop organizer: Antonio Loquercio

9:00 AM to 5:00 PM

Workshop: Challenges and Opportunities of Neuromorphic Field Robotics and Automation

Workshop organizers: Fernando Cladera, Kenneth Chaney, Ziyun (Claude) Wang (Johns Hopkins University), Varun Murali (Texas A&M University), Nitin Sanket (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), Cornelia Fermüller (University of Maryland), Camillo J. Taylor, Vijay Kumar

10:30 AM to 11:00 AM

Workshop: AI-Driven Safe Aerial Robotics

Morning Poster Session

Agile Flight Emerges from Multi-Agent Competitive Racing

Vineet Pasumarti, Lorenzo Bianchi, (University of Rome Tor Vergata), and Antonio Loquercio

2:00 PM to 2:45 PM

3rd Unconventional Robots: From Concept to Real-World Systems

Debate moderated by Robert Baines (ETH Zurich)

Morphology: Kyu-Jin Cho (Seoul National University), Kaushik Jayaram (Imperial College London), and Mark Yim

Control: Aaron Johnson (Carnegie Mellon University), Kento Kawaharazuka (The University of Tokyo), and William Johnson

2:00 PM to 2:50 PM

Geometry in the Age of Data‑Driven Robotics

Debate: Question 3 – Communication

Claim: Writing papers and giving talks using formal mathematical jargon only serves to increase the field’s barrier to entry.

Moderator: Jake Welde (Cornell University)

Pro: Ross Hatton (Oregon State University), Zachary Manchester (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Contra: Nadia Figueroa, Bruno Vilhena Adorno (University of Manchester)

2:15 PM to 3:30 PM

AI-Driven Safe Aerial Robotics

Invited Speaker: Vijay Kumar

“Toward Physical AI: Autonomy, Collaboration, and Language-Guided Behavior in Robotic Systems”

3:30 PM to 4:00 PM

The Workshop on Manipulation Robustness: Towards Human-Level Robustness under Real-World Challenges

Poster Session

Dreaming the Sound of Contact: Leveraging Video and Audio Generation for Zero-Shot Force-Aware Manipulation

Guanhua Ji, Tianyu Li, Dayoon Suh, and Nadia Figueroa

3:30 PM to 4:00 PM

The Workshop on Manipulation Robustness: Towards Human-Level Robustness under Real-World Challenges

Poster Session

Sample-Efficient and Statistically Rigorous Policy Comparison Using General Robot Performance Measures

David Snyder, Apurva Badithela (Princeton University), Nikolai Matni, George J. Pappas, Anirudha Majumdar (Princeton University), Masha Itkina (Toyota Research Institute), Haruki Nishimura (Toyota Research Institute)

3:30 PM to 4:00 PM

AI-Driven Safe Aerial Robotics

Afternoon Poster Session

LMPath: Language-Mediated Priors and Path Generation for Aerial Exploration

Jonathan A. Diller, Fernando Cladera, Camillo J. Taylor, Vijay Kumar

4:25 PM to 4:55 PM

ICRA 2026 Workshop on Semantics for Reliable Robot Autonomy: From Environment Understanding and Reasoning to Safe Interaction

Invited Speaker: George Pappas

“LLM-Enabled Robots: Jailbreaking Attacks and Defenses”