IROS 2026 Closing Briefing — Pittsburgh, Sep 27–Oct 1

IROS 2026 wraps in Pittsburgh: humanoids, hands and touch take center stage

IROS 2026 closed on October 1 after five days at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, with more than 1,900 papers, 86 workshops and tutorials, nine competitions and 186 exhibitor listings. The conference returned to Pittsburgh for the first time since 1995, hosted by General Chair Howie Choset of Carnegie Mellon University.

Three threads ran through the halls and the coverage: humanoids moving from stage demos to measured tasks, dexterous hands and tactile sensing becoming the busiest product category, and robot training data emerging as a sector of its own. China-based companies formed the largest exhibitor group by headquarters, about 62 of 166 companies, ahead of the US at about 45. Global media framed the result as a split strength: Chinese hardware on the show floor, US depth in models, compute and research.

By the numbers

The organizer has not yet published a final attendance count; pre-show estimates ranged from 4,000 to more than 7,000 participants.

Awards (presented Sep 30). Best Paper went to LT-Mem, a lifelong scene-memory system from DGIST (Korea). Best Student Paper went to a tight quadrotor formation-flight method from the University of Pennsylvania. Two humanoid papers took category awards: Galbot's humanoid tennis work (Best Entertainment and Amusement) and SteadyTray, humanoid tray transport (Best Mobile Manipulation). Sources: IROS awards program

Technology focus 1: Humanoids — from dance demos to measured tasks

Humanoids ran through every layer of the program: a dedicated assembly challenge, two category paper awards, keynotes from humanoid companies and the Robot Parade on September 30. Chinese trade press described the shift as a move from "performance demonstrations" to specific applications, physical-world data and model training.

On stage and in the arena

• Keynotes: He Wang (Peking University and Galbot) spoke on "Towards the AlphaGo and ChatGPT Moments of Embodied AI"; Al Rizzi presented RAI Institute's capability work; a Wednesday plenary debated generalist versus specialist robots (Press Kit).

• Humanoid IKEA Assembly Challenge: humanoids attempted flat-pack furniture assembly, co-organized by Unitree, BitRobot, Lightwheel and the Singapore Institute of Technology (challenge site).

• Volting Cup (humanoid category): France's IBISC lab took second prize with "Dancing with Live Music", a Unitree G1 dancing to a fabric tactile piano (IBISC).

• Paper awards: Galbot's "Learning Athletic Humanoid Tennis Skills from Imperfect Human Motion Data" and SteadyTray (humanoid tray balancing via residual RL) won category awards. ULTRA, a whole-body humanoid loco-manipulation controller, was a best-paper candidate.

On the show floor

Other humanoid and whole-body platform makers on the exhibitor list: Agility, AGIBOT, Unitree, Booster, Noetix, ROBOTERA (Silver), PNDbotics, MagicLab, Lumos, PHYBOT, X Square Robot, Dexmate, Westwood Robotics, PAL Robotics and Rainbow Robotics.

Technology focus 2: Dexterous hands and touch — the busiest product category

Dexterous hands drew the most product launches of the week, and tactile sensing drew overflow crowds in the session rooms. By RobotToday's count, 18 exhibitors make robotic or bionic hands, 11 of them China-based, and about 13 more sell tactile or force/torque sensors.

Hand launches

Other hand makers on the floor: Inspire Robots, Linkerbot (Bronze sponsor), WUJI Tech, DexRobot, Rysen Robotics (Bronze), OYMotion, BrainCo, PSYONIC, Chestnut Robotics, Seed Robotics, TESOLLO, Wonik Robotics and BionIT Labs, whose Adam's Hand prosthetic now ships in a humanoid version.

Tactile and force sensing

• PaXini (Platinum sponsor) ran a full-stack tactile booth: PX6AX GEN3 sensors, joint torque and 6-axis F/T sensors, e-skin, data gloves, hands and humanoids. A Chinese Academy of Sciences team using its sensor reported 67% insertion success at 0.05 mm clearance, with peak force cut 60%. CEO Mark Nie gave a keynote on multimodal embodied data.

• Link-touch  made its IROS debut with humanoid 6-axis F/T and joint torque sensors, claiming 0.1% FS precision and a high-end 6-axis sensor cost near RMB 10,000.

• Tashan, Daimon Robotics and others showed fingertip and hand sensors; Daimon unveiled a tactile world model for fabric handling.

• Research: a best-paper finalist, the VTAP Gripper (Purdue and Columbia), pairs fingertip tactile arrays with a visuo-tactile palm. Huxiu reported MIT's Edward Adelson and Columbia's FlexiTac team, whose open-source sensor cost fell from US$5 to US$1.36 per unit at 1,000 units.

The media consensus: touch is becoming the next training-data modality, not just a sensor. Open problems named onsite were durability, data redundancy and the lack of a common sensor protocol.

Technology focus 3: Industrial robots and the data layer

Industrial robotics had a smaller footprint than humanoids, but it carried the sponsor money and the deployment talk. The Industry and Exhibits Chair, Jim Ostrowski, comes from John Deere and Blue River Technology, and Deere was a Platinum sponsor.

• Applied and industrial sponsors: Path Robotics (AI welding), Symbotic (warehouse automation) and Amazon (four main-track papers, per Amazon Science) were Silver sponsors. Fujitsu (Gold) used its keynote to present the Kozuchi Physical OS strategy for scalable physical AI.

• Arms and cobots: Franka Robotics (Silver), Flexiv, ROKAE, DOBOT, Elephant Robotics, Kinova, Standard Bots and Clearpath by Rockwell Automation.

• Actuators and drives: maxon, SPG, EYOU, Kaiserdrive, MyActuator, Crabnova, ENCOS, HEBI and Barrett Drive Systems — a supply chain increasingly pitched at humanoid joints.

• Program: a dedicated award for Industrial Robotics Research for Applications, the ROCO collaborative assembly and Robotic Construction challenges, and keynotes on construction robotics (Genki Yamauchi) and composite manufacturing (Tim Bretl).

Robot training data is now an exhibitor category. About 24 exhibitors sell data, teleoperation or motion capture for robot learning. Data vendors included BodenAI, Datatang, Nexdata, Abaka AI, Deccan AI, iMerit, TELUS Digital, PrismaX and Lightwheel; mocap and glove makers included OptiTrack, Vicon, Qualisys, NOKOV, Noitom, Xsens, Rokoko, MANUS and SKYWORTH XR. NetEase noted two parallel answers to the data-cost problem: high-fidelity simulation and lightweight real-world capture rigs.

Audience and countries

Exhibiting companies came from at least 20 countries, and China and the US together made up about 72% of those with an identifiable headquarters. The organizer has not yet released attendee figures by country.

The research side was more spread out. The ten Best Paper finalists came from the US (Purdue, Columbia, Penn), South Korea (DGIST, POSTECH, KoreaTech, 42dot), Germany (Freiburg with Bosch) and China (SUSTech, Southeast University, Lingang Laboratory). Japan's presence ran through its sponsoring societies (RSJ, SICE), Fujitsu, Sony, Honda R&D and Hokuyo; the Middle East was represented by Abu Dhabi's Technology Innovation Institute and ASPIRE.

Takeaways and next stops

• Hardware has a Chinese center of gravity. China-based firms led the exhibitor count, the hand launches and the tactile category, and six of 18 sponsors.

• Hands and touch are the new battleground. Specs are converging on 20+ DOF, sub-kilogram hands with built-in tactile sensing; the open question is durability and data, not degrees of freedom.

• Humanoids are being judged on tasks. Furniture assembly, tray transport and tennis replaced choreography as the benchmarks that won attention and awards.

• Data is a business. Two dozen exhibitors now sell robot data, teleoperation rigs or motion capture.

• Research leadership stays distributed. Top awards went to Korea (DGIST) and the US (Penn), with China, Germany and Purdue/Columbia among best-paper finalists.

Next: ICRA 2027 in Seoul and IROS 2027 in Florence both exhibited in Pittsburgh to recruit attendees. The organizer's final attendance and country figures are still to come; RobotToday will update this briefing when they are published.