Call for Paper: Cognitive Robotic Systems (CRoS) at IEEE COMPSAC 2026 in Madrid from Jul 7-10

[Farhana Zulkernine]

Dear ML Researchers:

Please consider submitting a paper to the 1st symposium on Cognitive Robotic Systems (CRoS)) at IEEE COMPSAC 2026 to be held from July 7-10 in Madrid, Spain. 

***Important Dates***

Symposium Paper Submission: January 31, 2026

Visit www.compsac.org

Cognitive Robotic Systems (CRoS)

Dear Researchers and Practitioners,

 

COMPSAC—the IEEE Computer Society’s flagship conference on Computers, Software, and Applications—has served as a premier international forum for more than 50 years. Each year, it brings together leaders from academia, industry, and government to discuss cutting-edge research, emerging challenges, and future directions in computing technologies.

 

We are delighted to invite you to join us in celebrating COMPSAC’s 50th anniversary in Madrid, Spain, from 7–10 July 2026.

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The large foundational models in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have transformed machine cognition to the level that today humans can interact with machines using audio, video, chat, and gestures almost at the human-level. Multi-agent frameworks equipped with advanced predictive and prescriptive models and decision algorithms are serving as the backbone of intelligent robotic systems and services in many application domains. However, the technology still lacks open-source models for autonomous goal- oriented real time voice conversation, multimodal sensory perception, autonomous navigation in small mobile robots, effective fusion of AI and control theory for smooth robotic movements, and integration of world knowledge for situational awareness. The symposium on Cognitive Robotic Systems (CRoS) invites researchers to submit high quality research on robotic systems and services (with and without mechanical moving components).

We welcome robot demonstrations, extended abstracts on ongoing research (2 pages), along with high quality research papers as short papers (4 pages) and full papers (8 pages) on validated research prototypes. The following list shows the areas of interest for CRoS with robotic systems having some sort of cognitive human interaction.

• Context aware robots sharing space with humans
• Autonomous and embodied robots
• Grounding language in perception and action
• World-model learning and predictive simulation for robots
• Agentic AI for robot perception
• Assistive cognitive robots
• Emotion and/or gesture perception in cognitive robots
• Conversational robots
• Human robot interactions
• Collaborative robots (cobots) with cognitive reasoning
• Companion robots
• Robot pets
• High precision cognitive robots
• Mind, knowledge, and awareness in robots
• Policies for robot behaviour – do and don’t
• Safe robots and safety of robots
• Cultural adaptation and personalization in robotic systems
• Memory systems and episodic learning in cognitive robots
• Cognitive robotic applications

CRoS seeks original, unpublished high impact research manuscripts and demos. Acceptance criteria for full and short papers include novelty, presentation, impact, and technical accuracy based on presented validation strategy. Ongoing research can be submitted as long abstracts showing merits as potential impact, preliminary validation, or user-centric study. A best paper and a best student paper award will be given to the top-ranked papers based on the decisions of the review committee.

Symposium Chairs

Farhana Zulkernine

Queen’s University, Canada

Fabrizio Lamberti

Politecnico di Torino, Italy

Emiko Uchiyama

University of Tokyo, Japan

Hongsheng He

University of Alabama, USA

Regards, 

Farhana Zulkernine PhD PEng

Professor

School of Computing, Queen’s University

Kingston, ON, Canada

Http://cs.queensu.ca/~farhana/