IROS 2026 Pitssburgh, PA, United States, 27 September - 1 October 2026 | DAVID L. LAWRENCE CONVENTION CENTER, Location TBA

Sponsor and Partners

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IROS 2026 LRC News

🚀 ****We are excited to welcome GENISOM AI as a Platinum Sponsor of the IROS 2026 Legged Robot Challenges (LRC).

GENISOM AI Information: **https://lnkd.in/gdUaieHs**

This partnership will help us further support the international legged robotics community and create an exciting environment for teams to demonstrate their latest research and technologies at IROS 2026.

Thanks to GENISOM AI’s generous sponsorship, this year’s LRC will feature a total competition prize pool of USD 9,000:

🥇 1st Place —$5,000🥈 2nd Place —$3,000🥉 3rd Place —$1,000

We are grateful to GENISOM AI for supporting our participants, researchers, and the broader robotics community. We look forward to working together throughout IROS 2026.

One more announcement — applications are still open!

To give additional teams an opportunity to participate, we are extending the IROS 2026 LRC team application deadline by one week (08/31/2026)

Please fill out the form here! **https://forms.gle/p3FVzEgvFWN9J6Cm7**

LRC Schedule

Prelims (Monday & Tuesday, 0900-1800)

Individual lanes for trials with 20 minute rotations
All teams scheduled to perform every lane multiple times
Scores can be cumulative, or we can drop one score.
Day 1 the lanes are set to flat/easier.
Day 2 the lanes are set to sloped/harder variant.

Finals (Wednesday morning, 0900-1300)

Fewer teams, up to 8 according to this schedule.
Scores are reset to 0
Sequences of 3 lane trials (A | B sides) in 20 minute rotations
Day 3 the lanes are set to sloped/harder variant with increased complexity.

About the Competition

Legged Robot Challenges - Introduction (2026A).pdf

Action in QRC @ ICRA 2025: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/15l6bznjclIDxaLTFtRkP59LC64wQE6rd?usp=share_link
Rule Summary Video: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MthVpl7VoOJZQJJRkBOmApFOXYYLc9PO/view
[New Since ICRA 2026 LRC] Lane Walk Around Video: https://docs.google.com/videos/d/10zFbKAr-GsDx0thsSuelui3jSk_wv4iTJEVaiGIoGtk/edit?usp=sharing

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.

Public Evaluations Inspire Innovation and Collaboration

Evaluate and Compare: The main objective for teams is to challenge and learn about their robotic system capabilities while refining their approaches. Teams also learn what it will take for their robots to succeed in real-world applications. The best scoring teams can win awards to recognize their accomplishments.
Inclusiveness: Teams get as many trials as possible within the time available, so they can rigorously evaluate their robots across the terrains, obstacles, and tasks that support their research objectives. Teams schedule their own test plan each day to manage their own risks.
Remote Control: Operators must remotely control their robots while out of sight of the lane. All situational awareness must come through the operator interface. No talking to the operator is allowed during the trial except to reset a robot or for any other safety issue.
Autonomy: Autonomous behaviors are encouraged because real-world communications between the robot and the remote operator is often unreliable or intermittent with radio drop-out zones. Successful autonomous traverses must have NO INTERACTION WITH THE OPERATOR INTERFACE between end zones within each lane. Autonomous lane traverses score a 4x multiplier because autonomy is often slower than teleoperation. The operator may take over remote control in the lane end zones to set the next waypoint downrange or at any time during the traverse to finish the lane and score teleop points.
Resilience to Failure: Robot resets are allowed during trials to ensure some level of measurable success. The operator or team member with the best view of the robot should declare a reset. A 2-minute penalty allows the robot to be safely carried and reset at the start of the terrain lane in which it failed. The trial continues after the penalty time has elapsed.

Incremental Difficulty Settings

Standard Test Lanes for 2026

Participants

Autonomous

Remote Control

<aside> 🗓️ Important Dates

July 31, 2026 : Registration Deadline
DAY1 (27, September, 2026) - Setup (and practice for 2pm-6pm if possible)
DAY2 (28, September, 2026) - Practice day
DAY3 (29, September, 2026) - Preliminary trials/Semi finals
DAY4 (30, September, 2026)- Final trials, Award Ceremony (4PM to 6PM, Location: TBD) </aside>

<aside> 📢 Announcement

TBA : Award Ceremony and Announcement of Winners </aside>

Contact information: Dongbin Kim, [email protected]

Updated on June 29, 2026

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