Contact choices
Modes, transitions, and affordances
How robots represent, select, and switch between grasping, pushing, dragging, bracing, pivoting, pinning, and environment-assisted contact.
Topics of Interest
We welcome work on the following topics and related problems in contact-rich loco-manipulation.
Whole-body control
Forceful interaction while moving
Locomotion and manipulation policies that coordinate balance, mobility, contact forces, dexterity, and recovery for legged, humanoid, and mobile robots.
Sensing
Contact and object state estimation
Fusion of vision, proprioception, tactile sensing, force feedback, and action history to reason about slip, mass, friction, geometry, and hidden state.
Learning
Structured policies and representations
Action spaces, latent contact abstractions, planner-generated data, foundation models, and hybrid model-based or learning-based approaches.
Transfer
Generalization across bodies and tasks
Methods that transfer across quadrupeds, humanoids, wheeled bases, arms, hands, object families, terrain, and hardware constraints.
Evaluation
Benchmarks, metrics, and failure modes
Datasets, tasks, protocols, negative results, and metrics for robustness, safety, contact efficiency, energy, recoverability, and sim-to-real transfer.
Submission format
- 2–4 page workshop papers, excluding references.
- New results, work in progress, benchmark proposals, position papers, open problems, negative results, and failure analyses are welcome.
- Submit through the workshop venue on OpenReview.
- Formatting details and exact deadlines will be posted here when finalized.
Review process
- Each submission will receive at least two reviews from the program committee.
- Selection will emphasize relevance, clarity, novelty, technical quality, and potential to stimulate discussion.
- Papers already published at or accepted to the main CoRL 2026 conference are not eligible.
Presentation and recognition
- Accepted papers will be presented as posters, with a subset selected for short spotlight talks.
- A best workshop paper will be announced during the closing session.
- Selected authors may be invited to contribute to the post-workshop open-problems report.
Who Should Submit
We welcome researchers working on robot learning, contact-rich manipulation, legged locomotion, humanoids, mobile manipulation, whole-body control, perception, planning, simulation, benchmarks, and real-world deployment. Late-stage PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, and others early in their careers are especially encouraged to submit work in progress and join the discussion.
Workshop Outcomes
Accepted papers, slides, and the post-workshop open-problems report will be hosted on this website for open access.