[CFP] ICRA 2026 Workshop on "Accelerating Discovery in Natural Science Laboratories with AI and Robotics"
Adam Heins
Dear Colleagues,
We would kindly like to invite you to contribute to the ICRA 2026 Workshop on “Accelerating Discovery in Natural Science Laboratories with AI and Robotics” in Vienna, Austria.
For more details about the workshop, please visit the workshop website:
https://sites.google.com/view/robotic-accelerated-discovery/
Confirmed speakers include:
Pulkit Agrawal, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
Christine Allen, University of Toronto / Intrepid Labs, Inc., Canada
Genki N. Kanda, Institute of Science Tokyo, Japan
Michelle Lee, Medra AI, USA
Pascal Miéville, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland
Rodrigo Moreno, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark
We welcome prospective workshop participants to submit a paper (4-6 pages + citations) or a challenge to be presented at the workshop. The accepted papers and challenges will be posted on the workshop website and will not appear in the official IEEE proceedings.
From all accepted papers, we select three types of on-site contributions for the workshop:
- Pioneers of Natural Sciences Laboratory Robotics Talk: Senior doctoral students and early career researchers from natural sciences and robotics backgrounds will be selected to present their bodies of work. To be eligible for this, please additionally submit to the paper a one-page cover letter describing the applicant’s motivation for applying and outlining relevant research work and an academic CV.
- Poster Presentations: Submissions will be selected for poster presentations according to the pertinence to the workshop and the quality of the research. All selected posters will be presented in both the spotlight and the interactive poster sessions.
- Challenges: Submissions are invited for real-world challenges in lab automation that current automation solutions cannot yet solve, but that could potentially be addressed by a general-purpose robot manipulator. In particular, we are looking for tasks where pre-programmed waypoints or offline trajectory planning are insufficient, and more intelligent robot behavior is required. This includes scenarios where the robot needs to use visual or other sensory inputs to make real-time decisions, or where domain-specific knowledge (e.g., from chemistry or biology) is essential to completing the task. If applicable, briefly mention safety considerations in the task. We expect all challenges to include a short video showing how they are currently solved manually, or how a human typically performs them. Videos should ideally be 1–3 minutes long and uploaded as a shareable link (e.g., YouTube, Google Drive). For all challenge papers, we will have a special session to discuss these challenges.
Awards: We will provide financial support to the outstanding contributors.
We encourage researchers from academia and industry (both hardware and software companies) to participate in this workshop with their submissions. The review is single-blind and will be done by the workshop organizers and external reviewers. The papers will be selected based on originality, relevance to the workshop topics, contributions, technical clarity, and presentation.
Please check our website and find the instructions for submission.
Important dates:
- Deadline for paper submission: 1st of April 2026
- Notification of acceptance: 12th of April 2026
- Submission of the final version: 30th of April 2026
- Workshop Date: 1st June 2026
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
Application of Robotics, AI, and Automation to Life Sciences, Materials Research, Clinical Laboratories, and Pharmaceutical Development
Case Studies in Implementing Laboratory Automation
Cognitive Robotics and Artificial Intelligence for Laboratory Environments
Generic Robotic Skill Development of Laboratory Tasks
Human-Robot Collaboration/Interaction in Laboratories
Integration of Robotic Systems and Laboratory Instruments
Knowledge Discovery and Transfer of Experimental Results: From Hypothesis to Fundamental Understanding
Machine Vision Methods for Laboratory Robotics
Mobile Manipulation for Laboratory Automation
Multimodal Sensing and Perception for Robots in Labs
Robotics, AI, and Automation in Laboratories: Past, Present, and Future
Self-Driving Labs
Standardization in Laboratory Automation
System Architectures for Laboratory Automation
We look forward to receiving your submissions.
Best,
The Organizers:
- Kourosh Darvish, PhD, Toronto, Canada (kdar...@cs.toronto.edu)
- Moritz Eckhoff, Munich, Germany (moritz....@tum.de)
- Hatem Fakhruldeen, PhD, Johnson and Johnson, Spain (HFak...@ITS.JNJ.com)
- Andrea Gabrielli, Munich, Germany (andrea.g...@tum.de)
- Dennis Knobbe, Munich, Germany (dennis...@tum.de)
- Gabriella Pizzuto, PhD, Liverpool, UK (gabriell...@liverpool.ac.uk)
- Nikola Radulov, Liverpool, UK (Nikola....@liverpool.ac.uk)
- Naruki Yoshikawa,Tokyo, Japan (YOSHIKAW...@nims.go.jp)
- Henning Zwirnmann, Munich, Germany (henning....@tum.de)
- Adam Heins, PhD, Toronto, Canada (adam....@robotics.utias.utoronto.ca)
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The workshop is endorsed by the Leverhulme Research Centre for Functional Materials Design (University of Liverpool), the Acceleration Consortium (University of Toronto) and the Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (Technical University of Munich).
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