Dear Colleagues

We are pleased to share that Legged Robot Challenges will be hosted in IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2026 in Pittsburgh, PA, USA (09/27 - 10/01, 2026) !

The official IROS 2026 LRC website is just released here - https://quadruped-robot-challenges.notion.site/IROS-2026-Legged-Robot-Challe...

Main Organization: National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), University of Hartford, USA. Sungkyunkwan University, South Korea.

Main Sponsor: Will be announced soon!

Information: The IEEE RAS Legged Robot Challenges (LRC) evaluate remotely-operated and autonomous legged robots using standard terrains, obstacles, and tasks to quantitatively measure and compare capabilities. These challenges inspire innovation in legged robot mobility and have evolved to include embedded dexterity tasks for onboard manipulators. Any type of legged robot can participate, including quadrupeds, bipeds, or others. Each robot’s performance can be directly compared to similar implementations and sizes to identify best-in-class capabilities. Safety belays over top of each lane catch falling robots so increasingly difficult settings can be attempted without risk to the robots.

These Legged Robot Challenges are hosted at major robotics conferences each year to facilitate interactions between robotics researchers, commercial manufacturers, and various user communities that need capable and easy-to-use autonomous robots to perform tasks in complex and often hazardous environments. In addition to demonstrating the state-of-the-science in robotics for unstructured environments, these Legged Robot Challenges help validate and disseminate standard test methods that emergency responders and others worldwide can use to objectively evaluate and compare commercial robots for purchasing, support training with quantitative measures of remote operator proficiency, and compare results no matter where or when the evaluations are conducted.

Competition Registration Deadline: July 31, 2026.

For Competition Registration: Fill out the competition registration form, https://forms.gle/p3FVzEgvFWN9J6Cm7 (This is not for the conference registration). Teams that registered for the competition may need to register IROS 2026 separately at $300 (appx). The conference registration information will be updated later.

Contact for Questions: If you have any questions, feel free to contact us at d*k@hartford.edu

Sincerely, Dongbin Kim, Ph.D. Assistant Professor College of Engineering, Technology, and Architecture (CETA) University of Hartford Office: +1-(860)-768-5808 Email: d*k@hartford.edumailto:d****m@hartford.edu [cid:aa22b668-e6dd-42ce-898c-d6dc0aa9ecf1]