Record attendance and breakthrough research mark ICRA 2025 in Atlanta

The 2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) concluded on 23 May in Atlanta with a record 7,006 attendees and 2,107 technical presentations across 326 sessions.

Held at the Georgia World Congress Center, the event showcased cutting-edge robotics research, including award-winning papers, demonstrations, and editorial contributions.

Nancy Amato, ICRA co-chair, says: “ICRA is the preeminent conference for robotics. The award-winning papers demonstrate some of the most important work in the field.”

Award-winning papers

Best Conference Paper

• Marginalizing and Conditioning Gaussians Onto Linear Approximations of Smooth Manifolds with Applications in Robotics – Zi Cong Guo, James Richard Forbes, Timothy Barfoot
• MAC-VO: Metrics-Aware Covariance for Learning-Based Stereo Visual Odometry – Yuheng Qiu, Yutian Chen, Zihao Zhang, Wenshan Wang, Sebastian Scherer. (Also awarded Best Paper on Robot Perception.)

Best Student Paper (also Best Paper in Multi-Robot Systems)

• Deploying Ten Thousand Robots: Scalable Imitation Learning for Lifelong Multi-Agent Path Finding – He Jiang, Yutong Wang, Rishi Veerapaneni, Tanishq Harish Duhan, Guillaume Adrien Sartoretti, Jiaoyang Li

Additional Best Paper Awards

• ShadowTac – Giuseppe Vitrani et al. (tactile sensing)
• Point and Go – Allie Wang et al. (assistive robotics)
• TinySense – Zhitao Yu et al. (insect-scale aerial robotics)
• Physics-Aware Robotic Palletization – Tianqi Zhang et al. (automation)
• Robo-DM – Kaiyuan Chen et al. (robot learning)
• Human-Agent Joint Learning – Shengcheng Luo et al. (HRI)
• Soft Robot Worms – Carina Kaeser et al. (mechanisms/design)
• Rodent Ankle Exoskeleton – Juwan Han et al. (medical robotics)
• D(R, O) Grasp – Zhenyu Wei et al. (manipulation/locomotion)
• PolyTouch – Jialiang Zhao et al. (field/service robotics)
• No Plan but Everything under Control – Vito Mengers, Oliver Brock (planning/control)

Editorial Board and Reviewer Awards

Outstanding Associate Editors:

• Pyojin Kim, Sajid Nisar, Hasan Poonawala, Marco Cognetti, Anh Nguyen

Outstanding Reviewers:

• Abdalla Swikir, Long Zeng, Koutras Leonidas, Joao Marcos Correia Marques, Hyungtae Lim

“These editors and reviewers went above the call of duty,” said Seth Hutchinson, ICRA co-chair.

Best Expo Demonstration

• Kid COSMO: A Humanoid Robot Movie Character
  – Developed by UCLA for Netflix’s The Electric State, honored for its expressive humanoid capabilities.

ICRA 2026 will take place in Vienna, Austria, from 1-5 June.

More information, including award paper access and session videos, is available at 2025.ieee-icra.org.