Insect-scale Autonomy IROS 2026 Workshop · Pittsburgh · Oct 1, 2026

Call for Papers / Posters

IROS 2026 Workshop on Insect-Scale Autonomy

Date: October 1, 2026

Website: https://insect-autonomy.github.io/

Deadline: Aug 24, 2026

Submit on OpenReview

We invite submissions to the IROS workshop “Insect-Scale Autonomy.” Recent progress in robotics, perception, learning, control, and embedded AI has enabled increasingly small and agile robotic systems. However, achieving reliable autonomy at insect scale remains fundamentally constrained by limited sensing, computation, power, actuation, and packaging. Insects and other small animals demonstrate robust autonomous behaviors such as stabilization, navigation, exploration, escape, and recovery in cluttered and uncertain environments. Translating these principles into engineered systems requires new methods that tightly couple algorithms, mechanics, sensing, control, and hardware.

This workshop will bring together researchers working on insect-scale robotics, bio-inspired autonomy, resource-aware perception and learning, control under severe constraints, embodied intelligence, and low-power/edge AI. The goal is to identify the key technical bottlenecks, evaluation practices, and near-term milestones needed to advance reliable autonomy in resource-limited robotic systems. The accepted proposal frames the workshop around three technical sessions: resource-aware perception and learning, mechanics/actuation/design with control, and on-board compute, edge AI hardware, and deployment. The workshop will include invited talks, contributed presentations, posters, moderated discussions, and a panel on benchmarks, evaluation practices, and autonomy targets for insect-scale systems.

Submission Tracks

We invite submissions in two tracks:

A. Paper Track

The Paper Track is intended for contributed papers describing novel research, work in progress, benchmark proposals, systems, methods, or position papers relevant to insect-scale or resource-constrained autonomy. Submissions should be 3–4 pages, including figures but excluding references, in the IEEE conference paper format.

Accepted papers will be presented as posters, and selected papers will be invited for short spotlight talks during the workshop. Accepted papers may be made publicly available on the workshop website with author permission.

Authors are encouraged to submit an optional 2–3 minute video if their work involves robot experiments, hardware demonstrations, simulation results, or visualizations.

B. Poster-Only Track

The Poster-Only Track is intended for work that authors would like to present and discuss at the workshop but may not want to submit as a full workshop paper.

Poster-only submissions may be based on:

  • recently published work,
  • ongoing work,
  • preliminary results,
  • hardware systems,
  • datasets or benchmarks,
  • or position statements.

Poster-only submissions should include a 1–2 page abstract describing the work and its relevance to the workshop. There is no required poster template. Authors of accepted posters are expected to bring their own printed posters to the workshop.

Paper Track submissions should contain original or work-in-progress material. Because the workshop is non-archival, concurrent submission is permitted, subject to the policies of the other venue.

Note: At least one author of each accepted submission is expected to attend the workshop in person.

Topics of Interest

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Insect-scale and miniature autonomous robots
  • Bio-inspired sensing, control, and navigation
  • Biological principles from insects and small animals for autonomous systems
  • Resource-aware perception, state estimation, and learning
  • Event-based vision and neuromorphic sensing for small robots
  • Minimal, frugal, or efficient AI for robotics
  • Control and planning under sensing, compute, power, and payload constraints
  • Embodied intelligence and morphology–control co-design
  • Micro/miniature aerial, terrestrial, crawling, jumping, swimming, or hybrid platforms
  • On-board autonomy for severely constrained robots
  • Edge AI hardware, embedded computing, and neuromorphic processors
  • Energy-aware autonomy and power-constrained deployment
  • Actuation, mechanics, and design for small-scale autonomous systems
  • Robust autonomy in cluttered, uncertain, and contact-rich environments
  • Evaluation metrics, benchmarks, and autonomy targets for insect-scale systems
  • Datasets, simulators, hardware platforms, and reproducible evaluation tools

Submissions do NOT need to be limited to literal insect-sized robots. We also welcome work on broader resource-constrained autonomy when the methods, principles, or systems are relevant to small-scale embodied agents.

Submission Instructions

Submissions should be uploaded as PDF files through the workshop submission site:

Submission link: OpenReview

Paper Track submissions should use the IEEE conference paper format:

Deadlines are in Anywhere on Earth (AoE) time.

For questions about submissions, please contact: Chahat Singh (chahat.singh@colorado.edu)

Important Dates

  • Paper / poster submission deadline: August 24, 2026, 11:59 PM AoE
  • Acceptance notification: September 7, 2026
  • Final version deadline: September 14, 2026
  • Workshop date: October 1, 2026

Authors who require an early decision for visa or travel planning should contact the organizers.

Review Criteria

Submissions will be reviewed based on:

  • relevance to insect-scale or resource-constrained autonomy,
  • technical quality,
  • clarity of presentation,
  • originality or insight,
  • potential to stimulate discussion at the workshop,
  • and relevance across robotics, perception, control, design, embedded AI, or biological inspiration.

Submissions will be reviewed non-anonymously by the workshop organizers and invited reviewers.

Awards

Submitted papers and posters will be considered for workshop awards. Awards may include:

  • Best Paper Award
  • Best Poster Award

Award decisions will be based on technical merit, originality, relevance to the workshop theme, quality of presentation, and potential impact on the field.

Organizers

  • Chahat Singh, University of Colorado Boulder
  • Kaushik Jayaram, Imperial College London
  • Sean J. Humbert, University of Colorado Boulder
  • Guido de Croon, Delft University of Technology
  • Cornelia Fermüller, University of Maryland, College Park
  • Heiko Kabutz, University of Colorado Boulder