Lab-to-Production Workshop
Toward Industrial-Grade Perception and Manipulation
Sydney, Australia | July 17th, 2026
Recent robotics research increasingly targets physical general intelligence, emphasizing generality, learning, and adaptability across tasks. In contrast, industrial robots deployed in factories and warehouses—numbering in the millions worldwide—are optimized for precision, repeatability, reliability, and safety, but are typically single-purpose and tightly engineered for fixed workflows. This divergence has created a growing gap between what is demonstrated in research labs and what can be deployed in production environments.
This workshop focuses on the challenges of translating recent advances in autonomous manipulation and perception from lab to production. Rather than asking how industry can adopt existing research systems, we emphasize what researchers must change in their methods, assumptions, and evaluation practices to meet industrial constraints. Key research questions include:
This workshop aims to unite the industrial robotics community at RSS, bringing together researchers across different domains (e.g., manufacturing, warehousing, logistics) to broaden the discussion on how recent advancements in autonomy and AI have influenced the field. To foster new insights and collaborations, this workshop will feature invited technical talks by renowned experts, spotlight presentations by emerging academic and industrial researchers, and demos by academic and industry research groups to (1) disseminate ground-breaking methods and systems, (2) discuss open challenges facing autonomous industrial perception and manipulation, and (3) surface future research needs in the field.
Talk Title: TBD
Short Bio: Cori Stewart is Associate Professor of Creative Industries at Queensland
University of Technology. Cori develops large-scale transdisciplinary commercial research partnerships and
is currently building manufacturing projects that provide global leadership in design and robotics as part
of a wider Industry 4.0 innovation program.
Before her appointment at QUT Cori was a senior government officer delivering creative industries,
creative economy, innovation and entrepreneur & investment attraction policies and programs for a range of
governments. Career highlights include delivery of Australia's first Creative City policy for Brisbane
City Council; the world's first fully-fledged creative industries policy for the Queensland Government in
collaboration with US economist Michael Porter; and mapping Queensland's start-up ecosystem.
Cori has a significant track record of creating, managing and governing SME entities as well as large
projects that bring together multiple and often complex partnerships across government, commercial,
tertiary and NGO sectors.
Talk Title: Does diversity enable or destroy precision? How to prepare VLAs for the real
world
Short Bio: Maria Bauza is a research scientist at Google DeepMind in London, UK. Before
joining DeepMind, she received
the Ph.D. in Robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Bachelor’s degrees in Mathematics
and Physics from Universitat Politècnica
de Catalunya (UPC). Her research focuses on achieving precise robotic generalization by learning
probabilistic models of the world that allow robots to
reuse their skills across multiple tasks and environments. Maria received several fellowships, including
Facebook, NVIDIA, and LaCaixa fellowships. She
was also part of the MIT-Princeton Team participating in the Amazon Robotics Challenge, winning the
stowing task in 2017 and receiving the 2018 Amazon
Best Systems Paper Award in Manipulation.
Talk Title: Grounding Robotic Foundation Model with Real-World Control
Short Bio: Jianlan Luo is the Chief Scientist at AgiBot, where he leads the AI research
effort. Before joining AgiBot, Jianlan was a postdoc scholar at Berkeley AI Research, and a research
scientist at Google X. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley in 2020. He has
won best paper awards at ICRA and IROS, and was named to the MIT Innovators Under 35 list in 2024.
Talk Title: Integrating Robotics, Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence for robust
grasping and manipulation in real-world scenarios
Short Bio: Juxi Leitner is an Applied Science Manager at Amazon in Berlin, Germany. He
has spent the better part of the
last two decades conducting robotics research across academia, government, and industry. Before joining
Amazon, Juxi was
founder, CEO, and CTO of LYRO Robotics, a startup creating general-purpose pick-and-place robots for the
food supply chain based in Melbourne, Australia.
In 2017, his team from the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision won the Amazon Robotics Challenge.
Talk Title: Stow: Robotic Packing of Items into Fabric Pods
Short Bio: Nicolas Hudson is a Principal Applied Scientist at Amazon Robotics, a position
held since 2021. Previously, they served as
a Senior Principal Research Scientist at CSIRO's Data61, where they were the Principal Investigator for
the DARPA Subterranean Challenge Team and led a
team researching robotic capabilities. Nicolas has also worked as a Senior Roboticist at both Google and
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and held engineering
roles at X and Boston Dynamics. They earned a Bachelor of Engineering with honors in Mechanical
Engineering from the University of Canterbury and a PhD in
Mechanical Engineering from Caltech.
| 1:30 - 1:35 | Introduction and Opening Remarks |
| 1:35 - 2:00 | Invited Talk: Cori Stewart |
| 2:00 - 2:25 | Invited Talk: Maria Bauza |
| 2:25 - 2:50 | Invited Talk: Jianlan Luo |
| 2:50 - 3:20 | Spotlight Session and Poster Overview |
| 3:20 - 4:00 | Coffee Break and Poster Session |
| 4:00 - 4:25 | Invited Talk: Juxi Leitner |
| 4:25 - 4:50 | Invited Talk: Nicolas Hudson |
| 4:50 - 5:20 | Panel Discussion |
| 5:20 - 5:30 | Closing Remarks |
We invite extended abstracts of up to 3 pages (excluding references, acknowledgments, limitations, and
appendix) formatted in the RSS
template and submitted via the L2P Workshop
OpenReview console. The extended abstract must be submitted along with references, acknowledgments,
limitations, and appendices as one .pdf file. Supplementary videos, websites, or data are welcome in the OpenReview
submission but not required, and must maintain author and affiliation anonymity.
Best Paper and Best Poster Awards: The workshop will recognize outstanding contributions with a Best
Extended Abstract Award and a Best Poster Award.
Submissions will be reviewed in a double-blind process by workshop organizers and attendees.
Each submission must nominate one author as a reviewer to evaluate two other contributions, following the
RSS main
track's reciprocal review model. Authors are strongly encouraged to incorporate the feedback received from the
reviewers to be considered for awards.
Accepted abstracts will be published on the workshop website, invited for spotlight presentations, and presented
as posters.
We encourage forward-thinking submissions of new or in-progress ideas. Workshop paper versions of papers
accepted to the RSS 2026 main track or any other prior conferences are not permitted. We
strongly encourage in-person participation of at least one author in the workshop.
The timezone for all deadlines is Anywhere on Earth
(AoE).
| Paper Submission Opens | Monday, May 4 |
| Paper Submission Deadline | Friday, June 5 |
| Review Period | Saturday, June 6 - Friday, June 12 |
| Author Notification | Monday, June 15 |
| Camera-Ready Deadline | Friday, July 10 |
| Spotlight Video Deadline | Friday, July 10 |
| Poster Deadline | Friday, July 10 |
| Event | Friday, July 17 |
