The workshop is today! Room 415, David Lawrence Convention Center  ·  08:30 – 12:30 ET Watch live on Twitch
IROS 2026 Workshop  ·  Pittsburgh, PA

Toward Human-Level
Robotic Teammates
R&D State of the Art and Roadmap to the Future

Thursday, October 1, 2026
Half-day morning workshop  ·  08:30 – 12:30
David Lawrence Convention Center, Pittsburgh, PA
Room 415

Watch the workshop live Thursday, October 1  ·  08:30 – 12:30 ET The stream may run a few seconds to a minute behind the room.

Watch live on Twitch
Call for Posters

Submissions are closed

Thank you to everyone who submitted. The call closed on Friday, September 25, 2026, and the submitted posters are now online in the proceedings.

Attend the Workshop

RSVP is closed

Thank you to everyone who registered. Join us today in Room 415 of the David Lawrence Convention Center, 08:30 – 12:30 ET, or follow along on the live stream.

Companion Workshop  ·  ACS 2026, Edinburgh

The conversation continues in Edinburgh

Right after this workshop, we are organizing a companion workshop — Symbolic Orchestration of Agentic and Robotic Systems — at the 13th Annual Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems, Tuesday, October 6, 2026, University of Edinburgh, UK.

Overview

The emergence of agentic AI and the growing influence of neurosymbolic AI make it incumbent on the robotics community to assess their impact on integrating intentionality and reasoning with embodiment and perception.

While advances in machine learning-based, data-driven approaches have expanded the capabilities of robots in perception and control, cognitive modeling relying on symbolic knowledge, commonsense reasoning and ontologically-grounded perception interpretation is widely considered as the necessary complement to the empirical approaches for developing robust, intentional, reflective, trustworthy, explainable, and socially aware robots.

A core R&D question is how best to scale up from task-specific skills to integrated cognitive-robotic agency. The workshop will address neurosymbolic integration, long-horizon and hierarchical planning, human-robotic teaming and theory of mind, perception and action grounding, varieties of learning, trust, explainability, ethics, resource sharing, and other relevant topics.

We welcome contributions from researchers working at the intersection of symbolic AI, neural learning, and embodied autonomy, particularly those addressing the integration challenges that define the next frontier of robotic intelligence.

At a Glance

Workshop Highlights

Invited Talk

Alessandro Oltramari

Alessandro Oltramari, Ph.D.

Senior Manager, Cyber-Physical AI & Reasoning
Bosch Research, Pittsburgh & Carnegie Bosch Institute at CMU

"Cognitive Robotics in Industry: Challenges and Opportunities"

A perspective on deploying neuro-symbolic cognitive architectures in real-world, safety-critical environments, drawing on years of industrial research at Bosch.

Full talk details

Panel Discussions

Panel A  ·  State of the Art: What Works, What Doesn’t, and Why

A structured panel critically assessing where the field of cognitive robotics agrees, where it doesn't, and which problems remain open.

Panel B  ·  Community Roadmap

A community-building exercise where panelists and the audience collectively sketch a roadmap for future R&D in cognitive robotics.

Meet the panelists

Poster Session

An interactive coffee-break poster session with themed discussion tables, featuring posters accepted through the call for contributions.

View the posters

Special Publication

International Journal of Humanoid Robotics

International Journal of Humanoid Robotics

World Scientific Publishing  ·  Peer-reviewed since 2004

ISSN 0219-8436  ·  eISSN 1793-6942

Authors of selected contributions are invited to submit full papers for a workshop special issue, covering both physical and cognitive aspects of humanoid and biologically-inspired robots.

About the journal
The Panels

Meet the Panelists

The two panel sessions are the workshop's defining feature: one critically assessing where cognitive robotics stands today, the other sketching a community roadmap for what to build next.

The panel brings together researchers behind some of the field's landmark systems — cognitive architectures fielded on physical robots, developmental robotics, multi-robot teams, and neurosymbolic AI deployed in industry.

Panelist introductions
Matthias Scheutz Christian Lebiere Ramviyas Parasuraman Gal A. Kaminka
Minoru Asada Alessandro Oltramari Sergei Nirenburg Luis Sentis

Program Committee

Organizing Committee