Event Summary

The Queer in Robotics event at the IROS Community Building Day aims to build an inclusive community for queer students, researchers, and practitioners. Queer in AI’s demographic survey reveals that many queer scientists in the robotics community do not feel completely welcome in conferences and their work environments, with the main reasons being a lack of queer community and role models. The purpose of this event is to address these documented barriers that Queer researchers face by creating a venue for Queer researchers to find role models and communicate their research. We aim to facilitate academic development and increase visibility of the queer research community. 

Date and Venue

IROS Community Building Day 2026

Location: Pittsburgh, USA

Date: Tuesday, Sept 29, 2026 (Time TBD)

Call for Participation

We are pleased to announce that Queer in Robotics Workshop will be participating in the Community Building Day at IROS 2026 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. We hope you can join us! We are soliciting in-person participation, but will also have a set of hybrid lighting talks for those who aren't attending.

Queer in Robotics aims to create a safe and inclusive space for LGBTQIA+ researchers in robotics to present their work, build community, and connect with peers and mentors. We encourage submissions from transgender, non-binary, and queer BIPOC researchers and any researcher working in the areas relevant to the LGBTQIA+ community.

Important Dates

Submission deadline: Sept 18, 2026 (23:59 Anywhere on Earth)

Notification of acceptance:  Sept 21, 2026

Workshop Date: Sept. 29, 2026 (Time TBD)

Workshop Overview

The workshop brings together queer students, researchers, and practitioners working in robotics and related fields. We welcome all submissions about the intersection of robotics and queerness, as well as research in any area of robotics conducted by queer individuals.

Submissions

We welcome submissions that explore ANY research in ANY area of robotics conducted by queer individuals as well as any intersection of robotics and queerness. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Any robotics research conducted by LGBTQIA+ researchers

• Test-time adaptation paradigms to personalize robot behavior for queer users

• Representation learning for aligning robot rewards with queer users

• Social dynamics models/world models for better understanding queer users

• Whole-body control and motion retargeting for queer dance forms

• Benchmarks and evaluation metrics that measure distribution shift or performance gaps in queer user populations

• Queer perspectives on robotics design, ethics, and deployment

• Reflections on queerness in academic and research culture

• Personal narratives at the intersection of queerness and robotics

We welcome submissions of work that will be presented during the main IROS conference and work that has been previously presented.

Submission Options

We welcome submissions in a variety of formats, including research papers, extended abstracts, position papers, opinion pieces, surveys, and artistic expressions, e.g., art, poetry, or other creative work. Submissions should be made through our Google Form.

The review process will be single-anonymized (reviewers may know who you are, but you won't know who they are), and there is no strict page limit.

We will have three presentation options for submitted work: (1) a lightning talk presentation, a slideshow on the work; (2) a poster presentation, a standard research-style poster; and (3) an interactive discussion board, a large post-it note that you can use to facilitate discussion on topics you are passionate about. Both (2) and (3) will occur simultaneously during the Interactive Poster Session.

Link to Submit: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScuDPIzdkK__eIZhX_2HmNvX5ota8HGc0BWoXo1f0-ieH3ZzQ/viewform?usp=header

Example Submissions from Past Queer in AI Events

These submissions are meant to display the range of the range of submissions we expect to receive that include technical contributions, artistic contributions, and perspective contributions:

• Guardrails, not Guidance: Understanding Responses to LGBTQ+ Language in Large Language Models (Queer in AI @ NeurIPS)

• The 3rd Position, X (Queer in AI @ NeurIPS)

• A Bayesian account of pronoun and neopronoun acquisition (Queer in AI @ NAACL)

Generative AI Policy

We understand that generative AI can be helpful in the submission process, however, there is a potential for misuse that negatively impacts productive scientific interaction. We follow the policies of the IEEE and robotics conferences such as R:SS and CoRL, and have two main rules: (1) papers that contain confabulated citations will be desk-rejected after review, and (2) Authors assume full responsibility for all content in submissions.

Privacy Policy

We recognize that LGBTQ+ researchers in some countries and institutions are not protected by anti-discrimination laws. To support queer researchers from unprotected countries, we will follow the privacy guidelines that we have developed since the founding of Queer in AI to minimize the chances of adverse effects of participating in our workshop. All public-facing materials that will be published archival or non-archival online will collect explicit affirmative consent from the constituent members.