The 26th IEEE International Conference on Autonomous Robot Systems and Competitions (ICARSC 2026) took place on April 22–23. The conference was organized within ROBOTICA 2026 – 26th Portuguese Robotics Open, a RoboCup-sponsored local event, promoted by the Universidade de Aveiro, Universidade do Porto, Instituto Politécnico de Bragança, Universidade de Coimbra and Instituto Politécnico do Cávado e do Ave. A well-established international forum, ICARSC brought together academics and industry professionals working in autonomous robotics, with proceedings indexed in IEEExplore and Scopus.
ISR-Lisboa had authors in 13 of the 36 articles accepted for presentation:
Tiago Caldeira, Tiago Antunes, Majid Khonji, Jorge Dias and Pedro U. Lima | Interactive Construction of Multi-Grid MDPs: Bridging Natural Language and Real-Time Policy Visualization
Rodrigo Coimbra, Rui Bettencourt, Alberto Vale and Pedro Lima | Full-body Local Planning of a Mobile Manipulator using Reinforcement Learning
João Castelo-Branco, Alexandre Bernardino and José Santos-Victor | Integrating Deep RL and Bayesian Inference for Object Search in Mobile Robotics
Guilherme Fernandes and Plinio Moreno | In-hand object manipulation with various hand orientations for underactuated hands
André Teodósio, Alexandre Bernardino and Plinio Moreno | The Role of Trajectory Prediction in the Perception of Approaching Agents
Inês Cardoso Paiva, Alexandre Bernardino and Plinio Moreno | Dual Field of View Gaze Estimation with Knowledge Distillation for Mobile Robots
Duarte Diamantino, Afonso Oliveira, Pedro U. Lima and Alberto Vale | Autonomous Driving of a Competition Robot: Perception of the Environment and Control
Niusha Khosravi, Rodrigo Ventura and Meysam Basiri | Proactive Feature Assessment for LiDAR-Inertial Odometry Using Physical Signal Analysis
Inês Marques and Meysam Basiri | Connectivity-Aware Multi-UAV Coverage Path Planning via Simulated Annealing
Nivand Khosravi, Rodrigo Ventura and Meysam Basiri | Semi-Cooperative Dual-IMU Relative
Miguel Caeiro, Akshat Singh, Rodrigo Ventura and Meysam Basiri | A Unified Mixed Reality Interface for Dynamic Swarm Mission Planning and Control
Rodrigo Nishikawa, Rodrigo Ventura and Meysam Basiri | Two-Stage Recovery Control of a Quadrotor Tailsitter UAV Without Control Surfaces
As part of ROBOTICA 2026, the week ended with the Festival Nacional de Robótica | RoboCup Portugal Open, in which our SocRob@Home team participated.
Organized by Escola Secundária de Barcelinhos under Sociedade Portuguesa de Robótica, the Festival once again asserted itself as the largest competitive robotics event held in Portugal and the official national qualifier for RoboCup. The event drew universities, robotics and artificial intelligence research laboratories, and technology companies, while also welcoming teams from secondary and vocational schools, reinforcing the bridge between different levels of education and scientific research.
“The team’s goals for FNR 2026 focused primarily on testing our new software pipeline. Both the TIAGo robot (Bob) and the team’s software have undergone significant updates over the past year. As a result, this competition was an important opportunity to validate what works and what needs improvement under real-world testing conditions.”
Rodrigo Serra, team leader, explained that in the coming months, the team will focus on optimizing several key modules, such as vision, speech, navigation, and manipulation. In addition, special attention will be given to conducting more systematic testing of the competition tasks under conditions as close as possible to real-world conditions, in order to increase the robustness and reliability of our system and robot.
Video from the team’s Facebook page:
