It's the Demos: A Deep Look at the Role of Demonstration Quality in Imitation-Based Robot Manipulation
It's the Demos: Demonstration Quality in Imitation-Based Robot Manipulation
In conjunction with
Robotics: Science and Systems 2026
July 13-17, 2026
University of Technology Sydney
Sydney, Australia
Examines how demonstration quality fundamentally shapes imitation-based robot manipulation systems. Brings together researchers to establish shared metrics, best practices, and engineering standards for collecting and curating high-quality demonstration datasets at scale.
More workshops at Robotics: Science and Systems 2026
- Beyond Rigidity: Deformable and Articulated Robotic Object Manipulation — Addresses robotic manipulation of non-rigid objects - deformable items like clothes and cables, plus articulated...
- Data-Centric Robotics: What Data Do Robots Really Need? — Examines the critical role of data in robot learning, asking what kinds of data matter...
- 4th Workshop on Dexterous Manipulation: Scalable Learning for Human-Level Skills — Focuses on scaling dexterous manipulation by leveraging advances in robotic hand hardware, large-scale video datasets,...
- Diffusion for Robot Learning — Explores how diffusion models can be applied to robot learning for both data generation and...
- Embodied4Arts: Robots as Creative Partners for Artistic, Expressive, and Craft Tasks — Explores how robots can learn to perform creative tasks like painting, music, and crafting by...
- Reason, Plan, Act: A Hands-On Tutorial on Embodied Agentic AI — Teaches participants how to build autonomous AI systems that combine large language models with robotics,...
- Failure Is Not the End: Towards Open-World Failure Recovery for Robots — Addresses how robots can detect, diagnose, and recover from failures when operating in open-world environments...
- Robot Planning in the Era of Foundation Models (FM4RoboPlan) — Explores how foundation models such as LLMs, vision-language models, and diffusion models are transforming robot...
- Rethinking What It Means to be Safe for Generalist Robots — Addresses how to redefine safety for generalist robots that operate across diverse tasks and environments,...
- The Geometry of Motion: Physics-Informed Structures for Learning and Control — Examines how geometric and physics-based principles such as Lie group theory and Riemannian geometry can...
- Human-centric Mobile Manipulation Workshop — Addresses how mobile manipulation robots can effectively operate alongside humans in real-world environments by developing...
- From Imitation to Certification: Learning, Reasoning, and Formal Methods for Safe Robot Manipulation — Brings together researchers from imitation learning, AI, control theory, and formal verification to address safety...
- Lab-to-Production Workshop: Toward Industrial-Grade Perception and Manipulation — Addresses the gap between robotics research and industrial deployment by examining how to translate advances...
- Workshop on Neuromorphic Robotic Systems (NeuRoSys) — Examines how neuromorphic sensing and perception - technologies inspired by biological neural systems - can...
- Open-World Navigation in the Foundation Model Era: Robustness and Failure Recovery — Examines robust navigation systems for robots in unpredictable environments by leveraging foundation models while addressing...
- Planning and Control with Imperfect Sensors and Perception — Examines how autonomous robots can make decisions when their perception systems are imperfect and uncertain,...
- Post-training for Robotics Foundation Models — Examines how robotics foundation models can improve beyond initial pretraining by collecting their own interaction...
- From Perception to Action: Representation-Centric Robot Autonomy — Examines how different map and scene representations - geometric, probabilistic, dense, implicit, or learned -...
- Mapping the Reef: Underwater 3D Reconstruction for Coral Ecosystems — Focuses on developing and advancing 3D mapping technologies for monitoring coral reef ecosystems. Brings together...
- Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Language-Action Models (RL4VLA) — Addresses how reinforcement learning can improve Vision-Language-Action models for robotics by moving beyond imitation learning...
- Robot World Models — Focuses on developing world models - internal simulators that enable robots to anticipate how the...
- Sampling-Based Optimization for Robotics — Examines sampling-based techniques in robotics, exploring how methods from reinforcement learning and predictive control can...
- 3rd Workshop on Semantic Reasoning and Goal Understanding in Robotics (SemRob 2026) — Focuses on how robots achieve semantic understanding of the world to make safe decisions and...
- Closing the Sim2Real Gap: Progress and Challenges — Addresses the research challenge of bridging the gap between simulation and real-world robotics implementation. Examines...
- Bridging AI and Robotics: Towards Safer and Smarter Surgery — Explores the integration of AI and robotics in surgical applications, focusing on intelligent and autonomous...
- Tactile Sensing for Robotic Foundation Models — Explores how tactile sensing can be integrated into robotic foundation models at scale, addressing hardware...
- Embodied Intelligence Meets Foundation Models: Tactile Sensing and Soft Manipulation — Focuses on integrating tactile sensing, soft robotics, and foundation models to advance dexterous object manipulation...
- Trustworthy Embodied Foundation Models: Safety by Design versus Safety by Practice — Addresses safety challenges of deploying foundation models in robotic systems, exploring safety by design through...
- Towards Robust Execution of Long-Horizon Whole-Body Control Tasks — Addresses robot learning for complex extended tasks, focusing on deploying humanoids and manipulators on long-horizon...
- Whole-body Control and Bimanual Manipulation: Applications in Humanoids and Beyond — Brings together roboticists and machine learning researchers to discuss advances in whole-body control and bimanual...
- Beyond the Lab: Rethinking Methods for Human Behavior Monitoring and Modeling in In-the-Wild Human-Robot Interaction — Examines methodologies for observing and understanding human behavior in real-world robotic deployments, addressing the challenge...