Dear colleagues,
It is our pleasure to invite you to submit your works at the Workshop on Humanoid Soccer Robots (HSR) that is organised in conjunction with the IEEE-RAS Humanoid Robots 2026 https://2026.ieee-humanoids.org/ conference, held in Santa Clara, CA, USA on December 6 - 9, 2026.
We will have two exceptional speakers with very interesting and different views on the topic, and they will spark engaging and endearing conversations: Prof. Peter Stone, The University of Texas at Austin and Sony AI; Prof. Joydeep Biswas, The University of Texas at Austin; Dr. Yan Chang, NVIDIA; Prof. Amy Eguchi, University of California; Changjiu Zhou, Singapore Polytechnic.
You can find the full CFP below, but also on our website https://lab-rococo-sapienza.github.io/hsr2026/
Do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.
best regards
Vincenzo, Alessandra, Daniel and Zati Hakim
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Important Dates
Submission Deadline: 13 November, 2026
Notification Deadline: 22 November, 2026
Conference Dates: December 6 - 9, 2026
Workshop Date: 7 December, 2026
Objective and Scope
Robot soccer is a uniquely demanding benchmark for humanoid robotics: a robot must perceive and localize while moving, maintain balance under contact and uncertainty, execute agile whole-body skills, recover from falls, reason over long horizons, communicate with teammates, and make decisions in a fast, partially observable, adversarial environment. This workshop will connect the RoboCup community with the broader humanoid robotics, robot learning, control, and embodied-AI communities to examine how these capabilities can be advanced jointly rather than as isolated modules. The scope spans hardware-aware locomotion and manipulation, perception and state estimation, sim-to-real learning, foundation and vision-language-action models, multi-robot coordination, safety, benchmarking, and reproducibility. Particular attention will be given to methods that transfer beyond soccer to human-centered applications in warehouses, healthcare, inspection, entertainment, and everyday environments. The program will combine invited talks, peer-reviewed extended abstracts, short oral presentations, a panel, and an interactive roadmap session. Subject to venue and safety approval, teams will be invited to bring robots for live demonstrations or recorded demo presentations. The intended outcome is a shared set of research priorities, benchmark needs, and open challenges supporting measurable progress toward the RoboCup 2050 goal and robust general-purpose humanoids. Submission & List of Topics
The workshop is open to a broad audience from academia and industry researching on Autonomous humanoid soccer players, Humanoid control for robot soccer, Foundational models for humanoid soccer robots, Multi-agent communication, and Humanoid robot soccer as a benchmark for embodied intelligence.
We will invite authors to submit scientific papers ranging from 2 to 6 pages, with additional space for references and appendices. We will accept different types of works, including preliminary findings, case studies, position papers, surveys and cutting-edge research on the workshop topics. Accepted papers will have short oral presentations.
Authors should submit their papers formatted according to the IEEE two-column format http://ras.papercept.net/conferences/support/support.php, which is also used for contributions to the main conference. Use the following templates to create the paper and generate or export a PDF file: LaTeX https://ras.papercept.net/conferences/support/tex.php or MS-Word https://ras.papercept.net/conferences/support/word.php.
Authors need to submit their PDF via OpenReview ( https://openreview.net/group?id=IEEE.org/Humanoids/2026/HSR). Each paper will receive at least two reviews. All papers are reviewed using a single-blind review process: authors declare their names and affiliations in the manuscript for the reviewers to see, but reviewers do not know each other's identities, nor do the authors receive information about who has reviewed their manuscript. Contact
All questions about submissions should be emailed to Vincenzo Suriani (Sapienza University of Rome) at s*****i@diag.uniroma1.it, or Alessandra Rossi (University of Naples Federico II) at a**************i@unina.it
