TC Virtual Poster Session and Networking Event 2026
Overview
The Technical Committee on Optimization for Robotics will hold the annual Summer virtual poster session and networking event on Tuesday, July 28th, 2026 (9:00-11:30 AM EDT, 3:00-5:30 PM CEST, 10:00 PM - 12:30 AM JST). There will also be a Best Poster Award associated with the event, consisting of USD $250 that can be used within 2026 (until December 31st) for expenses eligible to be reimbursed by IEEE for the purpose of attending an IEEE-RAS conference (e.g. travel, conference fees, meals). The award will be selected at the end of the event.
Key dates:
Poster Registration Deadline: July 20th, (Submission link)
Decision notification: July 22nd
Poster Upload: July 24th (Link will be sent to accepted authors)
Event Details
Date/Time: Tuesday, July 28th, 2026 (9:00-11:30 AM EDT, 3:00-5:30 PM CEST, 10:00 PM - 12:30 AM JST)
Schedule (all times are in EDT) - there is an overlap of 30 minutes between the two poster sessions:
The event will be held virtually on Spatial.Chat, so it's open to participants worldwide. No registration needed to attend. The join link will be emailed a few days beforehand.
On the day before the event, this page will be updated to include the poster overview.
| Time | Schedule Item |
|---|---|
| 9:00 - 9:05 AM | Welcome |
| 9:05 - 10:30 AM | Poster Session 1 (room 1 and 2) |
| 10:00 - 11:25 AM | Poster Session 2 (room 3 and 4) |
| 11:25 - 11:30 AM | Closing remarks |
Session 1 Posters
Room 1
FARO: Feasibility-Aware Robot Motion Optimization
Michal Ciebielski, Shafeef Omar, Aaron Johnson, Majid Khadiv
Integrated Hierarchical Decision-Making in Inverse Kinematic Planning and Control
Kai Pfeiffer, Quan Zhang, Yuqing Chen, Gordon Owusu Boateng, Yuquan Wang, Vincent Bonnet, Abderrahmane Kheddar
Ergodic Imitation for Adaptive Exploration Around Demonstrations
Ziyi Xu, Cem Bilaloglu, Yiming Li, and Sylvain Calinon
A Hierarchical Hybrid Planning and Control Architecture for Redundant Manipulators via Adaptive Manifold Projection
Yuhan Wu, Kexin Qian, Fei Yu
Contact-Aware Planning and Control of Continuum Robots in Highly Constrained Environments
Aedan Mangan, Kehan Long, Ki Myung Brian Lee, Miheer Potdar, Nikolay Atanasov, Tania K. Morimoto
Room 2
MPC-Injection: Biasing Off-Policy Locomotion RL Toward Controller-Induced Behavior Basins
Roy Xing, Seyoung Ree, Brian Plancher
Programming Manufacturing Robots with Imperfect AI: LLMs as Tuning Experts for FDM Print Configuration Selection
Ekta U Samani and Christopher G Atkeson
PAC-DP: PAC-Bayesian Diffusion Policy Learning
Mohammad Hasan Yeganegi, Dian Yu, Andrea Del Prete, Majid Khadiv, Matteo Saveriano
Mobile Pedipulation for Object Sliding via Hierarchical Control on a Wheeled Bipedal Robot
Yue Qin, Yulun Zhuang, Zelin Shen and Yanran Ding
Optimization-Aware ViTAL: Visual-Tactile Fusion for Household Tasks with Tendon-driven Dual-Thumb Humanoid Robot Hand
James Casey, Harshitha Mallappa, Jinzhu Gao, Chi-Wook Lee, Omhier Khan, Dongbin Lee
Task Representation and Transfer using Diffused Orientation Fields
Cem Bilaloglu, Tobias Löw and Sylvain Calinon*
Session 2 Posters
Room 3
TD-CD-MPPI Temporal-Difference Constraint-Discounted Model Predictive Path Integral Control
Pietro Noah Crestaz, Ludovic De Matteis, Elliot Chane-Sane, Nicolas Mansard, Andrea Del Prete
TinySDP: Real Time Semidefinite Optimization for Certifiable and Agile Edge Robotics
Ishaan Mahajan, Jon Arrizabalaga, Andrea Grillo, Fausto Vega, James Anderson, Zachary Manchester, Brian Plancher
Adapting Rigid-Body Dynamics Derivatives for Constraint Embedding Closed-Chain Models
Daniel J. Volpi and Patrick M. Wensing
Certifiable Factor Graph Optimization
Zhexin Xu, Nikolas R. Sanderson, Hanna Jiamei Zhang, and David M. Rosen
Consensus based optimization: Towards global optimization in robotics
Xudong Sun
A Generalized Theorem of the Alternative for Certifiable Optimization with Redundant Constraints
Hanna Jiamei Zhang, Alan Papalia, Michael Everett, and David M. Rosen
Room 4
An Introduction to Zero-Order Optimization Techniques for Robotics
Armand Jordana, Jianghan Zhang, Joseph Amigo, Ludovic Righetti
Hardware-In-the-Loop Robust Co-Design of an Underactuated System Raphael Stöckner and Shivesh Kumar
TurboMPC: Fast, Scalable, and Differentiable Model Predictive Control on the GPU
Gabriel Bravo, Jianghan Zhang, Zachary Pestrikov, Brian Plancher, Thomas Lew
SurGE: Surrogate Gradient-guided Evolution for Co-design of Legged Robots with Parallel Elasticity
Yulun Zhuang, Yue Qin, Justin Lu, Zelin Shen, Yichen Wang, Sicheng He and Yanran Ding
Bi-Level Optimization for Contact and Motion Planning in Rope-Assisted Legged Robots
Ruben Malacarne, Ioannis Tsikelis, Enrico Mingo Hoffman and Michele Focchi