ICARSC 2026
Barcelos, Portugal
April 22-23, 2026
ICARSC
2026
Scientific Meeting April 22-23, 2026
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PROGRAM
Each paper will be allowed a maximum of 12 minutes for the presentation and 3 minutes for questions and answers.
Special Sessions ICARSC 2026
IEEE RAS PT Chapter
Intelligent Human-Robot Interaction with Emerging AI and Immersive Technologies
Chairs: Ana Lopes, Paulo Menezes, Paulo Gonçalves, João Bimbo
This special session is concerned with novel and emerging methods of Intelligent Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), with emphasis on the convergence of the latest trends in Artificial Intelligence with Virtual Reality. Current developments in Generative AI, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, and Virtual Reality are empowering robots to more naturally interact with humans.
This session intends to provide a forum for researchers investigating innovative HRI paradigms such as multimodal interactions, immersive environments or XR-related technologies for training & testing, generative models for reasoning and behavior generation, learning-based approaches for personalized as well as collaborative interactions, among other areas. This session aims to address human-centered, ethical, explainable, trustworthy robotic systems through the union of intelligent perception, language understanding, and immersive interfaces.
It is encouraged that the contributions point out theoretical achievements, methodology developments, or practical applications of intelligent HRI.
Keynote Speakers
Filipe Neves
Field Robotics for Sustainable Agriculture and Forestry
Agriculture and forestry are facing unprecedented challenges related to labor shortages, climate change, resource efficiency, and environmental sustainability. Field robotics is emerging as a key enabling technology to address these challenges by enabling precise, autonomous, and data-driven operations. The talk will explore why robotics is becoming essential for the future of agriculture and forestry, highlighting the specific constraints of outdoor environments such as perception in unstructured scenarios, navigation in complex terrain, energy efficiency, and robust autonomy. The talk will present the current state of the art in field robotics, including examples of autonomous systems for crop monitoring, precision interventions, and forest management. Also will be presented ongoing research and technological developments carried out at TRIBE Lab @ INESC TEC, showcasing robotic platforms, sensing technologies, and AI-driven solutions designed to support sustainable agricultural and forestry practices. Finally, the talk will discuss the main technological gaps and future research directions required to enable the widespread adoption of robotics in agricultural and forestry systems.
Filipe Neves holds a PhD degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Faculdade de Engenharia (FEUP), Universidade do Porto, Portugal. His professional passion is to develop autonomous robots and machinery to solve real problems, desires and needs of our society and to contribute for self-sustainability and fairness of the global economy. Actually, He is focused in developing and researching robotic solutions for agriculture and forestry sector, where is required a higher efficiency for our world self-sustainability. Considering his closer regional reality, he has set the goal to promote agricultural robotic based projects and develop robots that can operate fully autonomously and safely in steep-slope scenarios, which is a common reality of the North of Portugal and in other large numbers of world regions. As such, he is interested in exploring and developing robots for specific agricultural and forestry tasks such as: monitoring (by ground), spraying, logistics, pruning, and selective harvesting.
Claudio Semini
Quadruped Robot Design and their Applications from Agriculture to CleanTech and Space Exploration
In this talk I will take you on a journey of the evolution of quadruped robots with a special focus on nearly two decades of research and development of quadrupeds and their locomotion control at IIT. After a chronological overview of the various quadruped robot versions developed in my lab, it will focus on the most recent 140kg HyQReal robot. Next, it will present how transferring the developed technology into four different application fields and the market: ranging from agriculture and clean-tech to space exploration. The VINUM project focuses on the automation of winter pruning in vineyards with AI and mobile robots. The VERO project is about quadruped robots that collect littered cigarette filters from the environment. The INAIL Robot Teleoperativo project is about the teleoperation of quadruped robots with manipulation capability. Last, my talk will take you into the rapidly expanding field of space exploration. I will present the results of our ESA-funded project ANT that investigates the control and navigation aspects of quadruped and hexapod robots during space exploration in hard-to-access areas like craters on Moon and Mars. I will conclude with an outlook to future perspectives in the fast-growing field of quadruped robot technology.
Claudio Semini is the head of the Dynamic Legged Systems (DLS) lab at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) that developed a number of high-performance quadruped robots, including HyQ, HyQ2Max, and HyQReal. During his PhD and subsequent PostDoc at IIT, he developed the quadruped robot HyQ and worked on its control. Since 2012 he leads the DLS lab. Claudio Semini is the author and co-author of more than 150 peer-reviewed publications in international journals and conferences and he received several awards for them. He is also a co-founder of the Technical Committee on Mechanisms and Design of the IEEE-RAS Society. He is/was the coordinator/partner of several EU-, National and Industrial projects (including HyQ-REAL, INAIL Teleop, Moog@IIT joint lab, ESA-ANT, RAISE, FAIR, SPACE-IT-UP, etc). His research interests include the construction and control of highly dynamic and versatile legged robots for real-world operations, locomotion, hydraulic drives, and others. Ongoing projects range from space robotics, clean-tech, disaster robots to precision agriculture.