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CRoS seeks original, unpublished high impact research manuscripts and demos.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
Key Symposium Dates
Symposium Paper submission:
Extended to 20 February 2026 31 January 2026
Symposium Paper Acceptance Notification:
1 April 2026
Camera Ready Paper submission:
21 May 2026
Paper Templates
IEEE Paper templates are available in MS Word, LaTex, and Overleaf. All submissions must use US 8.5×11 letter page format.
IEEE Conference Publishing Policies
All submissions must adhere to IEEE Conference Publishing Policies.
Open Access Option
Authors may choose to publish their accepted papers as open access. For details, please refer to the Author Information page.
IEEE Cross Check
All submission will be screened for plagiarized material through the IEEE Cross Check portal.