March 2026 - RoboCup-worldwide

CFP: The 9th International Conference on Algorithmic Decision Theory (ADT 2026)
by Lirong Xia 12 Apr '26

12 Apr '26

The 9th International Conference on Algorithmic Decision Theory (ADT 2026) will be held at University Paris Dauphine-PSL on November 16-18, 2026 Established in 2009, the ADT conferences usually take place every two years with the aim of gathering researchers interested in the algorithmic aspects of decision theory. ADT seeks to bring together researchers and practitioners coming from diverse areas of Computer Science, Economics, and Operations Research in order to improve the theory and practice of modern decision support. Important Dates - Title and Abstract Submission: May 4th, 2026 - Full Paper Submission: May 11th, 2026 - Notification of acceptance: July 13th, 2026 - Final Version of Accepted Papers: August 11th, 2026 - Conference Dates: November 16th-18th, 2026 - Conference Webpage: https://adt2026.sciencesconf.org/ - Submission Webpage: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/ADT2026 About ADT 2026 The 9th International Conference on Algorithmic Decision Theory (ADT 2026) focuses on algorithmic decision theory broadly defined, seeking to bring together researchers and practitioners coming from diverse areas of Computer Science, Economics, and Operations Research in order to improve the theory and practice of modern decision support. The conference topics include but not restricted to: - Algorithms - Argumentation Theory - Artificial Intelligence - Computational Social Choice - Database Systems - Decision Analysis - Discrete Mathematics - Game Theory - Machine Learning and Adversarial Machine Learning - Matching - Multi-agent Systems - Multiple Criteria Decision Aiding - Networks - Optimization - Preference Elicitation - Preference Modeling - Risk Analysis and Adversarial Risk Analysis - Utility Theory Submission Site and Details Submissions are invited on significant, original, and unpublished research on all aspects of Algorithmic Decision Theory. Papers must be at most 15 pages long in the LNCS format (including references). The formal proceedings of ADT 2026 will be published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) <http://www.springer.com/lncs>. ADT 2026 will not accept any paper that, at the time of submission, has already been published in a journal or another venue with formally published proceedings. However, in order to accommodate the publication norms of the many fields that work on decision theory, papers can be submitted but not already published elsewhere (i.e., are under review) provided the authors note they are submitting for the non-proceedings track at the top of their submission. All papers will be peer-reviewed by a double-blind procedure. Therefore, papers must be submitted anonymously as pdf documents via the Microsoft CMT <https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/ADT2026> system. It is important and required that authors do not reveal their identities in submitted papers. Since the review process is double blind, authors must take measures to ensure that their identity is not easily revealed from the submission itself. Authors should include the submission number (as assigned by the conference system) in the author field of the submission, and refer to their prior work in a neutral manner (i.e., instead of saying “We showed” say “XYZ et al. showed”). It is acceptable to submit work that has been presented in public or has appeared on arXiv, provided the submission itself is anonymized. Submission Format: Authors should consult Springer’s authors’ guidelines and use their proceedings templates <https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-gu…>, either for LaTeX or for Word, for the preparation of their papers. Note that at least one author of each accepted paper is required to attend the conference to present the work. Authors will be required to agree to this requirement at the time of submission. In addition, the corresponding author of each accepted paper that will appear in the proceedings, acting on behalf of all of the authors of that paper, will need to complete and sign a Consent-to-Publish form, through which the copyright for their paper is transferred to Springer. You may submit an appendix of any length into the CMT system. There is a separate area in CMT for this, the appendix should be formatted in the same way as the main paper. Please note that reviewers are not required to review the appendix so the paper should stand on its own. To accommodate the publishing traditions of different fields, ADT 2026 will accept two types of submissions: Submissions with full text in the proceedings: Papers of this type will be accepted for either oral or poster presentation, or both. Each accepted paper of this type will be allocated at most 15 pages in the proceedings and there will be no distinction between papers accepted for oral or poster presentation in the conference proceedings. Submissions with two-pages abstract in the proceeding: Papers of this type will be accepted for either oral or poster presentation, or both. Each accepted paper of this type will appear as a two-pages abstract in the proceedings, along with a URL pointing to the full paper (on ArXiv or other service). This option is available to accommodate subsequent publication in venues that would not consider results that have been published in formal proceedings. Specifically, the full version of the two-pages abstract at ADT can be submitted to another archival conference or journal. Such papers must be formatted just like papers submitted for full-text publication, at the submission time, but authors are required to write “submission without proceedings” into the author field of their paper (instead of author names), if they choose this category. Otherwise, it will be assumed, by default, that their paper is submitted in the first category (submissions with full-text in the proceedings).

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*Extended Deadline* ICRA26 Workshop on Shared Challenges in Human-Centered and Resilient Robotic Autonomy
by Katarzyna Pasternak 31 Mar '26

31 Mar '26

Dear RoboCuppers, We have extended the deadline for submissions to the workshop *“Shared Challenges in Human-Centered and Resilient Robotic Autonomy <https://sites.google.com/cs.miami.edu/scr-icra26/call-for-contributions>”*, to be held in conjunction with *ICRA 2026*. Please find details below. Robots are increasingly expected to operate in various complex environments such as homes, factories, and disaster environments. While these domains differ in context and constraints, they share fundamental challenges such as robust autonomy in dynamic and uncertain settings, natural interaction with non-expert users, perception in cluttered or degraded environments, and reliable manipulation of diverse objects. Recent advances in AI and learning create new opportunities for adaptation and cross-domain transfer, while safety, ethics, and benchmarking remain central concerns for responsible deployment. This workshop brings together researchers from *domestic service robotics, smart manufacturing, and disaster response* to discuss cross-cutting challenges, transferable solutions, and unifying principles for resilient, human-centered robotic systems. *Topics of Interest (including but not limited to):* - Human–Robot Interaction and communication with non-expert users - Navigation, perception, and mapping in dynamic, unstructured, or degraded environments - Mobile manipulation and grasping in real-world contexts - Learning and adaptation for cross-domain transfer and task planning under uncertainty - Safety, ethics, and evaluation frameworks for long-term robust autonomy We especially encourage contributions reflecting on the transferability of skills and systems between different areas of robotics and contributions that reflect on *societal needs and implications* of deploying robotic systems in real-world settings such as homes, clinics, factories, and disaster sites. Papers may include short work-in-progress and position papers (2–4 pages) as well as long-format integration and experimental papers (4–8 pages). Each submission will undergo independent review by at least two reviewers. All submissions will be considered for both oral presentations and poster sessions. Selected high-quality submissions may be invited to a *special journal issue*. *Best Paper Award* will be presented at the workshop. *Important Dates* - *Submission deadline:* April 1, 2026 April 15, 2026 - *Decision notification:* April 15, 2026 May 1, 2026 - *Camera-ready deadline:* May 15, 2026 - *Workshop date:* June 1, 2026 *Submission Site* https://easychair.org/my2/conference?conf=scr2026 We warmly encourage participation from researchers across robotics, AI, and HRI communities, and we look forward to fostering a lively, cross-disciplinary discussion. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the workshop organizers. Best regards, *The SCR 2026 Workshop Organizing Committee*

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[Save the date] RoHOW 2026
by HULKs TUHH 29 Mar '26

29 Mar '26

Dear RoboCup Teams and Robotics Enthusiasts Worldwide, The HULKs, a student robotics team at the Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH), are excited to invite you to the *13th Robotic Hamburg Open Workshop (RoHOW)*, taking place from *November 27 to 29, 2026*! RoHOW provides an open platform to exchange insights and share advancements. Our flexible, participant-driven Open Conference format allows you to shape the program to match your interests. Expect engaging talks and hands-on workshops on topics like computer vision, locomotion, deep learning, and league development, alongside showcases from our industry partners. While our team has roots in the old Standard Platform League, we warmly invite participants from all RoboCup leagues. Whether you are a researcher or a robotic enthusiast, we welcome you to share knowledge and build connections at RoHOW. Event Details * *Date:* November 27–29, 2026 * *Location:* TUHH, Hamburg, Germany * *Participation Fee:* There will be a fee for this year's event. Exact costs will be announced in the upcoming CfP. * *Registration:* Deadlines and further details will follow in a separate email. * *Website: *https://rohow.de/2026/en/ If you have attended a RoHOW before and have ideas on how we can make the event even better, please share your thoughts with us via email or Discord. We look forward to welcoming returning friends and new faces from around the world to RoHOW 2026. Mark your calendars and stay tuned! Best regards, Team HULKs Hamburg University of Technology

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[CFP] 14th Workshop on Planning and Robotics (PlanRob) at ICAPS 2026
by Awaad, Iman 29 Mar '26

29 Mar '26

Dear colleagues, apologies for multiple copies... 14th Workshop on Planning and Robotics (PlanRob 2026) ICAPS’26 Workshop, Dublin, Ireland, June 28, 2026 *Description* AI Planning & Scheduling (P&S) methods are crucial to enabling intelligent robots to perform autonomous, flexible, and interactive behaviors, but they must be tightly integrated into the overall robot architecture in order to be effective. This requires strong collaboration between researchers from both the AI and the Robotics communities. To foster this, the workshop aims to provide a stable, long-term forum where researchers from both the P&S and Robotics communities can openly discuss relevant issues such as research and development progress, future directions, and open challenges related to P&S when applied to Robotics.Recent advances in large-scale learning models, multimodal perception, and whole-body robotic systems are reshaping the landscape of planning and execution. The 2026 edition of PlanRob explicitly aims to address these emerging challenges, with a focus on integrating symbolic, geometric, and learning-based approaches for robust, scalable, and adaptive robot autonomy. *Topics of interest* ...include but are not limited to: • Planning representations and models for robotics including domain modeling, abstraction, and formal representations • Robot planning at multiple levels, including mission, task, path, motion, and integrated task-and-motion planning • Learning-augmented planning for robotics, including: • learning-based methods for planning and control • generative models for planning • continual learning and planning architectures and algorithms • Foundation-model-based approaches for robot planning, including: • LLM-, VLM-, and action-model-based methods for task as well as task-and-motion planning • perception-grounded planning using vision-language representations • Planning, execution, and control integration, including robot architectures supporting tight coupling between deliberation and execution • Planning for complex robotic systems, including: • high-dimensional and whole-body robotic planning and execution • planning under real-world sensing • actuation, and computational constraints • Multi-agent and interactive planning, including: • coordination and cooperation in multi-robot systems • human-aware planning and execution for human–robot interaction • adversarial and competitive planning in robotic domains • Formal and algorithmic foundations of robot planning, including formal methods for verification, correctness, and safety • Large-scale and real-world robotic applications, including: • optimization of behavior in large-scale automated or semi-automated systems • deployment and evaluation of planning methods on autonomous and intelligent robots in real-world settings Important goals of the workshop are the discussion of solutions, results, open issues, and real-world challenges. *Important Dates* • Submission Deadline: April 20, 2026 (AoE) • Author Notification: May 15, 2026 • Camera-Ready Deadline: June 5, 2026 • ICAPS 2026 Workshops: June 28-29, 2026 *Submission* There are two types of submissions: - short position papers (four pages) - regular papers (up to 10 pages) Papers may have an additional page containing references. Regular papers may be scheduled with more time in the final program. A poster session may be considered to provide a further presentation opportunity. The guidelines for formatting are the same as is used for ICAPS 2026 papers as described at: http://www.aaai.org/Publications/Author/author.php), but with the AAAI copyright removed. The papers must be submitted in PDF format via the EasyChair system (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=planrob26). Please note that papers under review (e.g. which have been submitted to IJCAI-2026) are also welcome, however, in order to avoid potential conflicts, these manuscripts should be prepared as anonymous submissions for a double blind reviewing process. *Workshop Proceedings* Accepted papers will be published on the workshop’s website. The organisers are investigating the availability of journal editors in order to invite a selection of accepted papers from the workshop to a special issue or post-proceedings volume. *Organizing Committee* Iman Awaad, iman.awaad(a)h-brs.de Institute for AI & Autonomous Systems, Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, Germany & German International University, Egypt Alberto Finzi, alberto.finzi(a)unina.it Università di Napoli “Federico II”, Italy Andrea Orlandini, andrea.orlandini(a)istc.cnr.it Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies (ISTC-CNR), Italy Workshop website: https://icaps26.icaps-conference.org/program/workshops/planrob/

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RoboCup International Symposium 2026 Deadline Extension
by Matteo Leonetti 27 Mar '26

27 Mar '26

TL;DR: The deadline of the RoboCup Symposium has been extended to Friday 24 April. Please see the call for papers below, with the updated important dates. RoboCup International Symposium 2026 https://2026.robocup.org/symposium/ Monday 6 July 2026 Incheon, Republic of Korea. The 29th RoboCup International Symposium will be held on 6 July 2026, at the Songdo ConvensiA, Incheon, Republic of Korea. The symposium will be in conjunction with RoboCup 2026 (30 June to 6 July 2026). We call for submissions of papers reporting innovative, original research with relevance to areas of robotics and artificial intelligence as listed below. Within the described scope of topics, we also encourage submissions of high-quality overview articles, papers describing real-world research, and papers reporting theoretical results. Researchers are invited to submit their work independently of whether they participate in the RoboCup competitions or have a RoboCup team. In addition to the main track, this year introduces an Open Platforms & Tools Track focusing on interactive tools, hardware, and software frameworks with a high degree of usability. IMPORTANT DATES Submission of full papers: *24 April 2026* Notification to authors: 29 May 2026 Submission of camera-ready copies: 19 June 2026 RoboCup Symposium 2026: 6 July 2026 (RoboCup on 30 June - 5 July 2026) SUBMISSION AND PROCEEDINGS All papers will be peer-reviewed and evaluated by members of the program committee. The proceedings of the RoboCup International Symposium will be published and archived within the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNCS/LNAI) series by Springer-Verlag after the conference. Papers should be formatted following the LNAI author guidelines (https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-gu…) and must be electronically submitted through EasyChair (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=rcs26) Submission Types: 1. Main Track: Submissions are limited to 12 pages (including references). 2. Open Platforms & Tools: Submissions are limited to an Extended Abstract of max 4 pages, including a mandatory URL to a tutorial website (see track details below). OPEN PLATFORMS & TOOLS TRACK To foster practical exchange within the robotics community, the former Development Track has been reimagined for 2026 to focus on usability and interactivity. We invite submissions of open-source hardware designs, software frameworks, tools, datasets, and benchmarks that other teams can use. The goal of this track is to reward the creation of solutions that lower the barrier to entry or accelerate research for others. Submission Requirements: • Extended Abstract: A maximum 4-page paper describing the tool, its innovation, and its application to RoboCup or general robotics. • Tutorial Website: The abstract must include a link to a publicly accessible website containing documentation and a step-by-step tutorial. The tutorial must be sufficient to guide a new user through installing the software or building the hardware. Presentation Format: Accepted contributions will be presented at an Interactive Demonstration Session (replacing the traditional poster). Authors will be provided with a table and power to demonstrate their tool live to Symposium attendees. MAIN TRACK TOPICS Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: * Robot Hardware and Software - mobile robotics - humanoid robotics - sensors and actuators - embedded and mobile devices - robot construction and new materials - robot system integration - robot software architectures - robot programming environments and languages - real-time and concurrent programming - robot simulators - sim2real learning * Perception and Action - 3D perception - distributed sensor integration - sensor noise filtering - real-time image processing and pattern recognition - motion and sensor models - sensory-motor control - robot kinematics and dynamics - high-dimensional motion control * Robot Cognition and Learning - world modelling and knowledge representation - learning from demonstration and imitation - localisation, navigation, and mapping - planning and reasoning - decision making under uncertainty - neural systems and deep learning - complex motor skill acquisition - reinforcement learning and optimisation - motion and sensor model learning * Human-Robot Interaction - robot social intelligence - fluency of interaction - speech synthesis and natural language generation - natural language recognition - explainable robot behaviours - emotion recognition and reaction - understanding human intent and behaviour - safety, security and dependability - enabling humans to predict robot behaviour * Multi-Robot Systems - team coordination methods - communication protocols - learning and adaptive systems - teamwork and heterogeneous agents - dynamic resource allocation - adjustable autonomy * Education and Edutainment - robotics and artificial intelligence education - educational robotics - robot kits and programming tools - robotic entertainment * Applications and Benchmarking - search and rescue robots - robot surveillance - service and social robots - robots at home, at work and in public spaces - robots in the real world - performance metrics - human-robot interaction PROGRAM CO-CHAIRS Matteo Leonetti (King’s College London, UK) Asad Norouzi (Seneca Polytechnic, Canada) Jaeseo Park (Incheon Technopark, Republic of Korea) CONTACT You can contact the PC chairs at rcs26(a)easychair.org. On behalf of the program committee, Matteo Leonetti King's College London https://www.sensiblerobotsresearch.org/ https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/matteo-leonetti

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[meetings][CFP][ICMI 2026] Call for Papers for the 28th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2026)
by Alessandra Rossi 24 Mar '26

24 Mar '26

Dear Colleagues, It is our pleasure to invite you to submit your works at the *28th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2026)* which it will be held in the *beautiful and lively Naples, Italy*. ICMI is the premier international forum for advancing research at the intersection of multimodal artificial intelligence (AI) and social interaction to create technically innovative, effective, and human-centered multimodal interactive systems. A unique aspect of ICMI is its multidisciplinary nature, bringing together research in AI, multimodal data processing, and human-human and human-computer interaction to bridge behavioural understanding with technology, with an eye towards impactful applications that benefit people and society. We are keen to showcase novel input and output modalities and interactions to the ICMI community. ICMI 2026 will feature keynote speakers, technical full and short papers (including oral and poster presentations), demonstrations, exhibits, doctoral spotlight papers, and late-breaking papers. The conference will also feature workshops and grand challenges. You can find the full CFP below, but you can also find more information on https://icmi.acm.org/2026/ and please do not hesitate to contact us -> https://icmi.acm.org/2026/people/. Best regards Alessandra Rossi -- Alessandra Rossi, PhD Assistant Professor Fellow of the Higher Education Academy Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technologies - D.I.E.T.I. University of Naples Federico II Via Claudio, 21, 80125 - Naples, Italy w-page: https://alessandrarossi.net e-mail address: alessandra.rossi(a)unina.it e-mail address: a.rossi(a)herts.ac.uk X: @alhandra81 ICMI 2026 2ND CALL FOR PAPERS ============================================ 5-9 October 2026, Napoli - Italy https://icmi.acm.org/2026/ ============================================ The 28th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2026) will be held in Napoli, Italy. ICMI is the premier international forum for advancing research at the intersection of multimodal artificial intelligence (AI) and social interaction to create technically innovative, effective, and human-centered multimodal interactive systems. A unique aspect of ICMI is its multidisciplinary nature, bringing together research in AI, multimodal data processing, human-machine, and human-human interaction to bridge behavioral understanding with technology, with an eye towards impactful applications that benefit people and society. Novelty will be evaluated along two dimensions: scientific novelty and technical novelty. Accepted papers at ICMI 2026 must demonstrate novelty in at least one of these two dimensions. The theme of this year's conference is "Context and Cultural Awareness for Multimodal Interaction", to explore how context and cultural factors influence multimodal interaction systems, including their design, implementation, and evaluation. We welcome papers that address the integration of contextual understanding, such as environmental, social, and emotional factors, into multimodal interaction systems. We also encourage contributions that explore cultural considerations in the development and deployment of interactive technologies. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: * Affective computing and interaction * User-adaptive systems * Cognitive modelling and multimodal interaction * Context-aware modelling * Cross-cultural design and evaluation * Gesture, touch, and haptics * Healthcare, assistive technologies * Human communication dynamics * Human-robot/agent multimodal interaction * Human-centred AI and ethics * Interaction with a smart environment * Machine learning for multimodal interaction * Mobile and wearable multimodal systems * Multimodal behaviour generation * Multimodal datasets and validation * Multimodal dialogue modeling * Multimodal fusion and representation * Multimodal interactive applications * Novel multimodal datasets * Spoken/visual behaviours in social interaction * System components and multimodal platforms * Virtual/augmented reality and multimodal interaction Commitment to ethical conduct is mandatory, and submissions must adhere to ethical standards, in particular when human-derived data are employed. Authors are encouraged to consult the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct (https://ethics.acm.org/). *** Important Dates Abstract deadline April 13, 2026 Paper Submission April 20, 2026 Rebuttal Period June 1, 2026 Paper notification July 6, 2026 Camera-ready paper July 23, 2026 Presenting at the main conference October 6-8, 2026 *** ACM Publication Policies ACM's New Open Access Publishing Model. Starting January 1, 2026, ACM will fully transition to Open Access. All ACM publications, including those from ACM-sponsored conferences, will be 100% Open Access. Authors will have two primary options for publishing Open Access articles with ACM: the ACM Open institutional model or by paying Article Processing Charges (APCs). With over 1,800 institutions already part of ACM Open, the majority of ACM-sponsored conference papers will not require APCs from authors or conferences (currently, around 70-75%). Authors from institutions not participating in ACM Open will need to pay an APC to publish their papers, unless they qualify for a financial or discretionary waiver. To find out whether an APC applies to your article, please consult the list of participating institutions in ACM Open and review the APC Waivers and Discounts Policy. Keep in mind that waivers are rare and are granted based on specific criteria set by ACM. Understanding that this change could present financial challenges, ACM has approved a temporary subsidy for 2026 to ease the transition and allow more time for institutions to join ACM Open. The subsidy will offer: * $250 APC for ACM/SIG members * $350 for non-members This represents a 65% discount, funded directly by ACM. Authors are encouraged to help advocate for their institutions to join ACM Open during this transition period. This temporary subsidized pricing will apply to all conferences scheduled for 2026, including ICMI.

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2026 Call for Nominations for Silvia Coradeschi and Gerhard K. Kraetzschmar Awards (RoboCup)
by 岡田　浩之 23 Mar '26

23 Mar '26

Dear Colleagues, Prof. Silvia Coradeschi (d. Feb 5, 2014) was a founding trustee of RoboCup and an early visionary in the RoboCup initiative. She served as General Chair of RoboCup 1999 in Stockholm, Sweden, was a frequent competition participant, and was an exemplar of the RoboCup ideal of engaging in cutting-edge AI and Robotics research. Prof. Gerhard K. Kraetzschmar (d. July 24, 2019) joined RoboCup since its beginning in 1997 and significantly contributed to the development of the RoboCup Federation (Trustee since 2004, Vice-President from 2008 to 2016). He was involved in the organization of many of the leagues, with major contributions to RoboCupJunior, RoboCup@Home, and RoboCup@Work. He was the General Chair of RoboCup 2016 in Leipzig, Germany. To honor their extraordinary contributions to RoboCup and to honor their memories, the RoboCup Federation created “The Silvia Coradeschi RoboCup Award” in 2014 (https://www.robocup.org/silvia_coradeschi), for a young female RoboCup student or post-doctoral researcher, with distinguishing research and the “The Gerhard Kraetzschmar RoboCup Distinguished Service Award” in 2021 (https://www.robocup.org/gkk_award), to recognize the outstanding contributions of an individual for his/her exceptional leadership, service, and dedication that benefit RoboCup in any of its leagues. We are now calling for candidates for the 2026 Awards. The award recipients, to be named at RoboCup 2026 will receive: a certificate a US$1,000 honorarium Nominations for the “Silvia Coradeschi Award”: Eligible candidates for the “Silvia Coradeschi Award” are female graduate students and post-doctoral researchers who received their degree within the past 3 years and will register for RoboCup 2026. The two criteria are: Distinguishing research as evidenced by, for example, refereed public ations. RoboCup leadership, either within a team and/or in the broad RoboCup community. To nominate a female student or post-doctoral researcher for the “Silvia Coradeschi Award”, the individual's professor should fill out the nomination form (https://forms.gle/xe8VqF14FpaPgg1HA) by May 15, 2026. The submission should include: A letter of recommendation that addresses both criteria. An additional letter of recommendation from a RoboCup community member not affiliated with the nominee’s team is recommended (but not required) to support the nomination. Please upload the letters to the form by the professor recommending the can didate. Nominations for the “Gerhard Kraetzschmar RoboCup Distinguished Service Award”: Eligible candidates for the “Gerhard Kraetzschmar RoboCup Distinguished Service Award” are RoboCup members with an outstanding record of service in one or more of the RoboCup Leagues, including as Technical and Organizing Committees, Executive Committee, and/or Board of Trustees. To nominate a RoboCup member for the “Gerhard Kraetzschmar RoboCup Distinguished Service Award”, a person nominating a candidate should fill out the nomination form (https://forms.gle/xe8VqF14FpaPgg1HA) by May 15, 2026. The nomination must include a letter of recommendation that addresses the individual’s impact on service and contributions to RoboCup, including diversity, quality, and length of the work done for RoboCup. One or two additional letter(s) of recommendation from RoboCup community members to support the nomination. Please upload the letters to the form by the person nominating the candidate. Best regards Hiroyuki Okada -- Hiroyuki OKADA, Ph.D. Trustee of the RoboCup Federation Chair of the RoboCup Japanese Regional Committee Professor of Tokyo Information Design Professional University, Tokyo Japan

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[meetings][CFP][ICMI 2026] Special Session on Empowering Society through Personalised Multimodal HRI
by Alessandra Rossi 19 Mar '26

19 Mar '26

Dear Colleagues, It is our pleasure to invite you to the Special Session on *Empowering Society through Personalised Multimodal HRI* which it will be held at the 28th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI), in the beautiful Naples (Italy) on 5-9 October 2026. You can find the full CFP below, but you can also find more information on https://icmi.acm.org/2026/special-sessions/ and please do not hesitate to contact us. Best regards Alessandra Rossi -- Alessandra Rossi, PhD Assistant Professor Fellow of the Higher Education Academy Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technologies - D.I.E.T.I. University of Naples Federico II Via Claudio, 21, 80125 - Naples, Italy w-page: https://alessandrarossi.net e-mail address: alessandra.rossi(a)unina.it e-mail address: a.rossi(a)herts.ac.uk X: @alhandra81 SPECIAL SESSION on Empowering Society through Personalised Multimodal HRI 28th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction 5-9 October 2026, Naples, Italy ICMI website https://icmi.acm.org/2026/ Submission Guidelines https://icmi.acm.org/2026/guidelines/ Submission deadline April 20th, 2026 Paper notification July 1st, 2026 The vision of personal robots capable of supporting, cooperating with, and living among humans holds immense potential for societal good. To realise this vision, robots must move beyond one-size-fits-all interactions and autonomously tailor their behaviour to the unique characteristics of individuals, including their culture, preferences, and cognitive and physical abilities. Personalisation can significantly enhance human-robot interactions in various real-world scenarios by increasing engagement through tailored content, building trust and rapport, improving adherence to the interaction, and enhancing task performance, thus configuring such a technology as a viable tool for promoting equity and access in domains like healthcare, education, and assisted living. As multimodal systems, robots integrate multiple channels of communication and perception to interact with humans and their environment effectively. For instance, a robot equipped with speech recognition capabilities can understand verbal commands and engage in spoken dialogue with users. At the same time, its vision system allows it to perceive facial expressions, gestures, and other visual cues, providing additional context for interpreting the user’s intent and emotional state. Moreover, tactile sensors enable the robot to sense touch and physical interactions, enhancing its ability to respond appropriately to human gestures and contact. By integrating these modalities, the robot can tailor its behaviour dynamically based on the information it gathers from each channel. This special session aims at exploring how robots can interact meaningfully across diverse contexts by going beyond speech and vision processing. It will collect works that explore the need for robots to be culturally and context-aware—capable of understanding not only what people said, but how it is expressed, considering differences and similarities in the richness and expressiveness of communication styles, and what those expressions mean within specific cultural frameworks. This session also focuses on personalisable intelligent agents that are able to adapt not only to individuals, but to the communities and traditions that shape them. Finally, with this special session, we want to promote a design of empowering robotic technologies, developed with and for the people they support, in order to foster inclusivity, embrace diversity, and generate long-term social benefits. To this extent, this special session welcomes research works from a multidisciplinary group of researchers, including, but not limited to, psychology, neuroscience, computer science, robotics, and sociology, to share and discuss current approaches to empowering social assistive robots with adaptive and learning capabilities in order to foster research and development of robotic solutions specifically designed for meeting the individual’s unique needs. Topics include, but are not limited to: - Personalisation in short and long-term HRI - User modelling in HRI - Personalisation for inclusion - Robot’s personality - Socially-aware personalization - Context and situation awareness for robots - Engagement evaluation and re-engagement strategies - Personalised dialogue with robots - Personalised non-verbal behaviour with robots - Adaptive human-aware task planning - Theory of Mind for adaptive interaction - Machine Learning for robotic personalization - Lifelong (continual) learning for adaptation - Adaptation in multimodal interaction - Affective and emotion-adapted HRI - Persuasion in HRI - Personalisation for Sustainability - Culture-aware robots - Evaluation metrics for adaptive robotic behaviour - Ethical implications of personalization - Robot customisation and teaching Contact All questions about submissions should be emailed one of the organisers: Antonio Andriella, Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial, Spain, aandriella(a)iri.upc.edu Wing-Yue Geoffrey Louie, Oakland University, USA, louie(a)oakland.edu Alessandra Rossi, University of Naples Federico II, Italy, alessandra.rossi(a)unina.it Silvia Rossi, University of Naples Federico II, Italy, silvia.rossi(a)unina.it

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[meetings] [news] 2nd CfP: The 5th Benchmark for Autonomous Robot Navigation (BARN) Challenge -- ICRA 2026 Competition
by Xuesu Xiao 16 Mar '26

16 Mar '26

Now that the IROS 2026 deadline is behind us, it’s time to gear up for The BARN Challenge! Submission Form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeIwC6GY_mAl1J18G1uZOaAn-OCONmmtaP… Competition Website: https://people.cs.gmu.edu/~xiao/Research/BARN_Challenge/BARN_Challenge26.ht… ROS Participation Instructions: https://github.com/Daffan/the-barn-challenge ROS2 Participation Instructions: https://github.com/Saadmaghani/The-Barn-Challenge-Ros2 Lessons Learned from The BARN Challenge 2025: https://people.cs.gmu.edu/~xiao/papers/barn25_report.pdf Lessons Learned from The BARN Challenge 2024: https://people.cs.gmu.edu/~xiao/papers/barn24_report.pdf Lessons Learned from The BARN Challenge 2023: https://people.cs.gmu.edu/~xiao/papers/barn23_report.pdf Lessons Learned from The BARN Challenge 2022: https://people.cs.gmu.edu/~xiao/papers/barn22_report.pdf Dear roboticists, are you interested in agile robot navigation in highly constrained spaces with a lot of obstacles around, e.g., cluttered households or after-disaster scenarios? Do you think mobile robot navigation is mostly a solved problem? Are you looking for a hands-on project for your robotics class, but may not have (sufficient) robot platforms for your students? If your answer is yes to any of the above questions, we sincerely invite you to participate in The 5th BARN Challenge at ICRA 2026 (https://people.cs.gmu.edu/~xiao/Research/BARN_Challenge/BARN_Challenge26.ht…)! The BARN Challenge aims at evaluating state-of-the-art autonomous navigation systems to move robots through highly constrained environments in a safe and efficient manner. The task is to navigate a standardized Clearpath Jackal robot from a predefined start to a goal location as quickly as possible without any collision. The challenge will take place both in the simulated BARN dataset and in physical obstacle courses at ICRA 2026. 1. The competition task is designing ground navigation systems to navigate through all 300 BARN environments (https://people.cs.gmu.edu/~xiao/Research/BARN/BARN.html) and physical obstacle courses constructed at ICRA 2026 as fast as possible without collision. 2. The 300 BARN environments can be the training set for learning-based methods, or to design classical approaches in. During the simulation competition, we will generate another 50 unseen environments unavailable to the participants before the competition. 3. We will standardize a Jackal robot in the Gazebo simulation, including a Hokuyo 2D LiDAR, motor controller of 2m/s max speed, etc. 4. Participants can use any approaches to tackle the navigation problem, such as using classical sampling-based or optimization-based planners, end-to-end learning, or hybrid approaches. We will provide baselines for reference. 5. A standardized scoring system is provided on the website. 6. We will invite the top teams in simulation to compete in the real world. The team who achieves the fastest collision-free navigation in the physical obstacle courses wins. If you are interested in participating, please submit your navigation system at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeIwC6GY_mAl1J18G1uZOaAn-OCONmmtaP… Co-Organizers: Xuesu Xiao (George Mason University) Zifan Xu (UT Austin) Saad Abdul Ghani (George Mason University) Aniket Datar (George Mason University) Daeun Song (Ewha Womnas University) Peter Stone (UT Austin / Sony AI) Sponsor: Clearpath Robotics, https://clearpathrobotics.com/ Thanks Xuesu ----------------------- Xuesu Xiao, Ph.D. -- Assistant Professor Department of Computer Science George Mason University xiao(a)gmu.edu <mailto:xiao@gmu.edu> https://people.cs.gmu.edu/~xiao/ https://robotixx.cs.gmu.edu/

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RoboCup International Symposium 2026 second call for papers
by Matteo Leonetti 12 Mar '26

12 Mar '26

Call for papers RoboCup International Symposium 2026 https://2026.robocup.org/symposium/ Monday 6 July 2026 Incheon, Republic of Korea. The 29th RoboCup International Symposium will be held on 6 July 2026, at the Songdo ConvensiA, Incheon, Republic of Korea. The symposium will be in conjunction with RoboCup 2026 (30 June to 6 July 2026). We call for submissions of papers reporting innovative, original research with relevance to areas of robotics and artificial intelligence as listed below. Within the described scope of topics, we also encourage submissions of high-quality overview articles, papers describing real-world research, and papers reporting theoretical results. Researchers are invited to submit their work independently of whether they participate in the RoboCup competitions or have a RoboCup team. In addition to the main track, this year introduces an Open Platforms & Tools Track focusing on interactive tools, hardware, and software frameworks with a high degree of usability. IMPORTANT DATES Submission of full papers: 8 April 2026 Notification to authors: 29 May 2026 Submission of camera-ready copies: 19 June 2026 RoboCup Symposium 2026: 6 July 2026 (RoboCup on 30 June - 5 July 2026) SUBMISSION AND PROCEEDINGS All papers will be peer-reviewed and evaluated by members of the program committee. The proceedings of the RoboCup International Symposium will be published and archived within the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNCS/LNAI) series by Springer-Verlag after the conference. Papers should be formatted following the LNAI author guidelines (https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-gu…) and must be electronically submitted through EasyChair (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=rcs26) Submission Types: 1. Main Track: Submissions are limited to 12 pages (including references). 2. Open Platforms & Tools: Submissions are limited to an Extended Abstract of max 4 pages, including a mandatory URL to a tutorial website (see track details below). OPEN PLATFORMS & TOOLS TRACK To foster practical exchange within the robotics community, the former Development Track has been reimagined for 2026 to focus on usability and interactivity. We invite submissions of open-source hardware designs, software frameworks, tools, datasets, and benchmarks that other teams can use. The goal of this track is to reward the creation of solutions that lower the barrier to entry or accelerate research for others. Submission Requirements: • Extended Abstract: A maximum 4-page paper describing the tool, its innovation, and its application to RoboCup or general robotics. • Tutorial Website: The abstract must include a link to a publicly accessible website containing documentation and a step-by-step tutorial. The tutorial must be sufficient to guide a new user through installing the software or building the hardware. Presentation Format: Accepted contributions will be presented at an Interactive Demonstration Session (replacing the traditional poster). Authors will be provided with a table and power to demonstrate their tool live to Symposium attendees. MAIN TRACK TOPICS Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: * Robot Hardware and Software - mobile robotics - humanoid robotics - sensors and actuators - embedded and mobile devices - robot construction and new materials - robot system integration - robot software architectures - robot programming environments and languages - real-time and concurrent programming - robot simulators - sim2real learning * Perception and Action - 3D perception - distributed sensor integration - sensor noise filtering - real-time image processing and pattern recognition - motion and sensor models - sensory-motor control - robot kinematics and dynamics - high-dimensional motion control * Robot Cognition and Learning - world modelling and knowledge representation - learning from demonstration and imitation - localisation, navigation, and mapping - planning and reasoning - decision making under uncertainty - neural systems and deep learning - complex motor skill acquisition - reinforcement learning and optimisation - motion and sensor model learning * Human-Robot Interaction - robot social intelligence - fluency of interaction - speech synthesis and natural language generation - natural language recognition - explainable robot behaviours - emotion recognition and reaction - understanding human intent and behaviour - safety, security and dependability - enabling humans to predict robot behaviour * Multi-Robot Systems - team coordination methods - communication protocols - learning and adaptive systems - teamwork and heterogeneous agents - dynamic resource allocation - adjustable autonomy * Education and Edutainment - robotics and artificial intelligence education - educational robotics - robot kits and programming tools - robotic entertainment * Applications and Benchmarking - search and rescue robots - robot surveillance - service and social robots - robots at home, at work and in public spaces - robots in the real world - performance metrics - human-robot interaction PROGRAM CO-CHAIRS Matteo Leonetti (King’s College London, UK) Asad Norouzi (Seneca Polytechnic, Canada) Jaeseo Park (Incheon Technopark, Republic of Korea) CONTACT You can contact the PC chairs at rcs26(a)easychair.org. On behalf of the program committee, Matteo Leonetti King's College London https://www.sensiblerobotsresearch.org/ https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/matteo-leonetti

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