What to Expect at ICRA, ROSCon, and Other Key Robotics Conferences: A First-Timer’s Guide

TL;DR: ICRA, IROS, ROSCon, RSS, and Humanoids are among the core robotics conferences worth attending if you build mobile robots, work with ROS 2, or run a research lab. ICRA and IROS are large academic venues with peer-reviewed papers, workshops, and exhibitor floors. ROSCon is a practitioner-focused developer event around the ROS ecosystem. RSS is smaller and theory-heavy. This guide explains how these robotics conferences differ, what to expect as a first-timer, and how to plan your time so you leave with working contacts, reproducible ideas, and a clear sense of where the field is heading.

Why Robotics Conferences Matter and What This Guide Covers

Robotics conferences are where peer-reviewed research, open-source tooling, and field experience meet in person. For a researcher, robotics engineer, or systems integrator, attending the right event accelerates work that would otherwise take months of paper reading and forum scrolling. You see live demos, talk to maintainers of the libraries you depend on, and benchmark your assumptions against what other labs actually ship.

This guide focuses on robotics conferences, not competitions. Events like RoboCup or the DARPA Challenges are valuable but follow a different format. Here, the focus is on academic and developer gatherings: ICRA, IROS, ROSCon, RSS, Humanoids, and a few regional events. Expect a practical breakdown of what each one is, who attends, and how to prepare if it’s your first time.

How the Main Robotics Conferences Differ

Before booking flights, it helps to understand that not every robotics conference serves the same audience. Some are paper-driven, some are code-driven, and some sit between research and industry. The table below summarizes the key venues most engineers and researchers in mobile robotics and ROS 2 will consider.

Quick Comparison Table

The following table compares the five robotics conferences most relevant to mobile robot developers, ROS 2 users, and field robotics teams.

• ICRA (IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation) – Annual, typically May/June. Organized by IEEE RAS. Large scale (often 5,000+ attendees). Peer-reviewed papers, workshops, tutorials, and a sizable exhibitor hall. Broad scope: manipulation, perception, planning, mobile robots, learning.
• IROS (IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems) – Annual, typically October. Comparable in size and rigor to ICRA. Slightly stronger emphasis on intelligent systems and field robotics in some years.
• ROSCon – Annual developer conference for the ROS community, organized by the ROSCon organizing committee with support from the Open Robotics / OSRF ecosystem. Usually held in autumn, sometimes near other major robotics events. Smaller (roughly 700-900 attendees in recent years). Talks are practitioner-focused: ROS 2 internals, Nav2, MoveIt 2, real deployments.
• RSS (Robotics: Science and Systems) – Annual, single-track main conference, highly selective. Usually hundreds to around 1,000 attendees. Strong theoretical and algorithmic content. Good if you want depth over breadth.
• IEEE-RAS Humanoids – Annual, focused on humanoid robotics, bipedal locomotion, and whole-body control. Smaller and specialized.

Regional events also deserve attention. European Robotics Forum (ERF), ROS-Industrial events, and national meetups such as ROS Meetup Poland are lower-cost ways to start if travel budgets are tight.

What to Expect at ICRA and IROS as a First-Timer

ICRA and IROS share a similar structure. Expect three to five days of parallel paper sessions, half-day or full-day workshops, plenary talks, poster sessions, and an exhibition floor. The paper program is dense: dozens of tracks can run in parallel, with short oral presentations often lasting anywhere from a few minutes to around 15 minutes depending on the session format.

Workshop and tutorial days usually sit at the beginning and/or end of the conference. These are often more useful than the main program for a first-timer because they go deeper into a single topic, such as legged locomotion, SLAM benchmarking, or learning from demonstration. Workshop organizers also tend to invite practitioners who do not publish full papers but show working systems.

Poster sessions are where real conversations happen. A short talk rarely gives you time to ask the author about implementation details, failure modes, or which sensors they actually used. At the poster, you can. Bring a notebook and write down repository links on the spot, because authors update slides and posters between events.

The exhibitor floor at ICRA and IROS is mixed. You will find component vendors (lidars, motors, compute modules), platform vendors, simulation companies, and sometimes academic spin-offs. It’s a fast way to compare hardware specs side by side and ask engineers technical questions you would not get answered over email.

How ROSCon Differs from Academic Conferences

ROSCon is structured differently. It is single-track or lightly parallel, focused on talks rather than papers, and the audience is mostly engineers who ship ROS-based systems. Topics range from middleware (DDS, Zenoh), to Nav2 tuning, to lessons learned from deploying autonomous mobile robots at scale.

If you work daily with ROS 2 and want to understand what is changing in the next distribution, ROSCon is one of the most efficient uses of two to three days you can find. Talks are recorded and posted publicly within weeks, so you can catch up on what you missed, but hallway conversations with maintainers are not recorded. That is the real value of attending in person.

Expect Birds-of-a-Feather sessions, lightning talks, and a sponsor area where companies show robots running ROS 2. Many maintainers of packages you use daily (Nav2, MoveIt, ros2_control, micro-ROS) are present and approachable.

How to Prepare Before You Go

Preparation separates a useful trip from an expensive blur. The following checklist applies to ICRA, IROS, ROSCon, and RSS alike.

1. Read the program in advance. Identify five to ten papers or talks that directly relate to your current work. For ICRA and IROS, the detailed program is typically published in the weeks before the event.
2. Mark workshops first, paper sessions second. Workshops are where you meet people working on your exact problem. Paper sessions are easier to catch up on later via video or PDF.
3. List people you want to talk to. Authors of papers you cite, maintainers of libraries you use, engineers from labs whose hardware setup you admire. Send a short email a week before: “I’ll be at ICRA, would you have 15 minutes to discuss X?”
4. Prepare a one-sentence description of your work. You will repeat it dozens of times. Make it specific. “We benchmark VIO algorithms on a 6.5 kg UGV in outdoor terrain” works better than “I do robotics research.”
5. Bring business cards or a QR code linking to your project. Contact exchanges still happen.

What to Do Once You Are There

On site, time management matters more than you expect. A few practical habits help.

• Skip talks you can read later. If a paper is well-written, the PDF will cover 80% of the talk content. Use that time for posters and hallway conversations.
• Sit near the front in workshops. It makes asking questions easier and signals interest to the organizers.
• Eat lunch with strangers. Conference lunches are designed for mixing. Avoid the trap of sitting only with colleagues you already know.
• Take photos of poster QR codes and bibliographies. You will forget half of what you saw within a week.
• Write a one-page trip report on the flight home. List the three most important ideas, five papers to read, and three people to follow up with. Without this, the trip’s value decays fast.

How Mobile Robot Platforms Fit Into the Conference Picture

If your work involves field robotics or education, you will see open-source mobile robot platforms used as research tools at almost every venue. Platforms like the Leo Rover appear in university posters, workshop demos, and ROSCon talks where reproducibility matters. The value of an open hardware UGV at these events is straightforward: you can point to a paper, see the exact platform it ran on, and replicate the setup in your own lab.

For researchers planning to publish at ICRA or IROS, using a documented, ROS 2-compatible platform shortens the path from idea to reproducible result. Fictionlab maintains documentation, ROS 2 packages, and a community forum specifically for this kind of work. You can read more about how the platform is used in research applications and education.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Which robotics conference should I attend first if I work with ROS 2?

A: ROSCon. It is smaller, practitioner-focused, and the content maps directly to daily engineering work. ICRA or IROS make more sense once you have a paper to present or a specific research question to discuss.

Q: Do I need to submit a paper to attend ICRA or IROS?

A: No. Anyone can register as an attendee. Submitting a paper, workshop poster, or late-breaking result gives you a clearer reason to be there and makes networking easier, but it is not required.

Q: How much does attending cost?

A: Registration for ICRA and IROS typically runs several hundred to over a thousand USD depending on membership and timing. ROSCon is usually lower. Add travel, accommodation, and meals. Student rates are significantly reduced at all major venues.

Q: Are talks recorded?

A: ROSCon publishes recordings publicly within weeks. ICRA and IROS recording availability is inconsistent and often limited to registered attendees rather than fully public. RSS sometimes posts videos. Plan as if hallway conversations are the only non-recoverable content.

Q: What should I bring besides a laptop?

A: A portable charger, a notebook, business cards or a QR code, comfortable shoes, and a refillable water bottle. Conference venues are large and you will walk more than you expect.

Q: Is it worth attending if I am not in academia?

A: Yes, particularly ROSCon, IROS workshops, and industry sessions or the exhibition at ICRA. Many talks address production deployment, safety, and integration challenges that pure academic work skips.

Q: How do I find collaborators at a conference?

A: Workshops, poster sessions, and Birds-of-a-Feather meetings. Approach authors whose work overlaps with yours and propose something concrete: a benchmark, a joint experiment, a shared dataset. Vague offers of “let’s collaborate” rarely lead anywhere.

Keep Learning Between Conferences

Conferences are concentrated bursts of information, but the work happens between them. Fictionlab’s blog covers ROS 2 tutorials, field robotics case studies, and updates from the Leo Rover and Raph Rover community throughout the year. Read more articles and join the discussion at the Fictionlab blog.