From Simulation to the Real World: Robotics' Big 2026 Conference Season
IROS 2026 just wrapped in Pittsburgh with nearly 5,000 submissions, and the dominant theme of the year is teaching robots in virtual worlds so they work in ours.
Robotics research runs on two flagship conferences. ICRA 2026 took place in Vienna from June 1 to 5. IROS 2026, the other giant, ran in Pittsburgh from September 27 to October 1. The scale tells its own story: IROS received 4,947 paper submissions this year and accepted 1,585 of them, an acceptance rate of about 36%.
The theme of the year: sim-to-real
Training a robot in the physical world is slow, expensive and occasionally destructive. Training it in simulation is fast and cheap, but robots trained that way often fail when they meet real friction, lighting and clutter. Closing that 'sim-to-real gap' is one of the field's central problems.
At ICRA 2026, NVIDIA's research teams presented eight robotics papers aimed squarely at that gap. They covered coordinating several robot arms at once, navigation that adapts across different kinds of robots (a framework called COMPASS), precision grasping, and complex assembly tasks.
What's coming next
NVIDIA has said it plans to release its next-generation GR00T N2 robotics models by the end of 2026, aimed at stronger reasoning and learning from multiple kinds of input. Industrial partners such as ABB and KUKA are part of that ecosystem, which suggests these research ideas are heading toward factory floors, not just lab demos.
Credit where it's due
Research by NVIDIA Research and the IROS / ICRA author communities. Conference figures from OMRON SINIC X.
Sources
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