Part of IROS 2026

First Special Session on Robotics in Space Exploration

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2026)

September 27 - October 1, 2026
Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Call for Papers

We invite researchers and practitioners to submit original work on cutting-edge robotics technologies for space exploration. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Mechanical Design of Robots
  • Autonomous Mobile Platform
  • Perception and Motion Planning
  • Task-specific Autonomy
  • Robot Simulation Environments for Space Exploration
Important Dates

Submission Deadline:
March 2, 2026

Acceptance Notification:
June 16, 2026

Accepted Papers

According to the Special Session guidelines, eight papers were submitted and five were ultimately accepted. All accepted papers are scheduled for presentation on Tuesday afternoon in Room 406.

PAPER #2251 — SpaceSense-Bench: A Large-Scale Multi-Modal Benchmark for Spacecraft Perception and Pose Estimation

Authors: Aodi Wu, Jianhong Zuo, Zeyuan Zhao, Xubo Luo, Ruisuo Wang, Xue Wan

Tuesday, 2:30 PM | Room 406

IROS Program arXiv Page
PAPER #3072 — Distributed Multi Robot Lunar Cargo Transportation Via Phase Decomposed Reinforcement Learning

Authors: Ashutosh Mishra, Elian Neppel, Shreya Santra, Antoine Jonquières, Muhammad Athallah Naufal, Kentaro Uno, Kazuya Yoshida

Tuesday, 2:41 PM | Room 406

IROS Program arXiv Page
PAPER #3192 — Precision Pointing of Dual-Module MagLev Space Observatories Via Hierarchical Fixed-Time-Synchronized Control

Authors: Hanzhou Wang, Biyue Pan, Siyang Li, Rongchuan Zhang, Jianwei Liu, Dongyu Li

Tuesday, 2:52 PM | Room 406

PAPER #3943 — Dual-Horizon Hybrid Internal Model for Low-Gravity Quadrupedal Jumping with Hardware-In-The-Loop Validation

Authors: Haozhe Xu, Yifei Zhao, Wenhao Feng, Zhipeng Wang, HongRui Sang, Cheng Cheng, Xiuxian Li, Zhen Yin, Bin He

Tuesday, 3:03 PM | Room 406

IROS Program arXiv Page
PAPER #4446 — Multi-Agent Off-World Exploration for Sparse Evidence Discovery Via Gaussian Belief Mapping and Dual-Domain Coverage

Authors: Zhuoran Qiao, Tianxin Hu, Thien-Minh Nguyen, Shenghai Yuan

Tuesday, 3:14 PM | Room 406

IROS Program arXiv Page

Poster Template

We provide an optional poster template for presenters. Feel free to download and use it for your poster presentation.

Special thanks to Zhuoran Qiao for contributing this template!

Download poster.pptx

Organizers

Inquiries

For any questions, please contact: syuan003@e.ntu.edu.sg & doongli@ieee.org