Contact-Rich Mobile Manipulation for Robust Real-World Deployments

Workshop Day: 27th/September/2026 | Sunday | Time: 8.30 Am to 12.30 pm

Abstract

Mobile manipulation (MoMa) is becoming a key capability for robotics across domains such as logistics, manufacturing, healthcare, and home assistance. While recent systems can execute increasingly complex tasks, real-world deployment reveals a major bottleneck: robustly handling physical contact with the environment. Many important tasks, such as opening doors, operating valves, performing assembly or manipulating objects in clutter, require sustained and controlled interaction, tightly coupling perception, planning, control, and learning across the whole robotic system. 

This workshop focuses on contact-rich mobile manipulation as a foundational capability for deployable robots. Coordinating mobile base motion, arm manipulation and environmental interaction requires robots to intentionally establish, regulate and sustain contact while safely managing incidental interactions. Such physical interaction is not merely a task-level feature but a system-level capability that directly reflects robustness and reliability in real-world deployments. Despite its growing importance and application potential, contact-rich mobile manipulation remains relatively underexplored as a unified research area, with advances emerging across multiple related research communities.

Building on previous MoMa IROS workshops that addressed generalization challenges (2024) and modularity for multi-stage workflows (2025), MoMa 2026 focuses on contact-rich mobile manipulation as a foundational capability for robust, deployable, and generalizable robotic autonomy in real-world environments. The workshop will bring together researchers working on mobile manipulation (perception, unified control, and task and motion planning), learning-based interaction, multi-modal perception, tactile sensing, contact-rich manipulation, sim-to-real learning, and real-world robotic deployments. Its goal is to explore recent advances across these related areas and discuss emerging approaches and challenges for robots that must reliably operate through physical interaction.

Scope

• Whole-body control and base–arm coordination for contact-rich mobile manipulation.
• Compliant, force, impedance, and operational-space control for sustained interaction.
• Multimodal perception combining vision, tactile sensing, force/torque, proprioception, and LiDAR.
• Learning contact-rich skills through reinforcement learning, imitation learning, teleoperation, simulation, and real-world data.
• Integration of model-based control, planning, and learning-based interaction policies.
• Generalization of manipulation skills across tasks, tools, environments, and robot embodiments.
• Safe handling of intentional contact, incidental collisions, environmental uncertainty, and human interaction.
• Design of adaptive end-effectors, tools, and robotic systems for scalable real-world deployment.

Organizers

Call for Papers

We welcome authors to submit extended abstracts (2-4 pages excluding references) showcasing relevant work on workshop topics, including field-collected dataset analysis, robot technologies and platforms, interactive demonstrations, and innovative, creative, and futuristic solutions within the workshop context.

• Format: Submissions should be in IROS conference standard PDF format.
• Page Limit: Maximum of 2-4 pages (excluding references).
• Review Process: All submissions will undergo peer review based on relevance, technical quality, and ethics.
• Presentation Opportunities: Accepted papers will be presented as posters, with some selected for spotlight talks during the workshop.
• Publication: Accepted papers will be available on the workshop website.

Submission Timelines

**Submission deadline:  20th/August/2026**

**Notification of acceptance:  25th/August/2026**

Workshop Day: 27th/September/2026 | Sunday | Time: 8.30 Am to 12.30 pm

**Please send your contribution to: rajkumar.muthusamy@dubaifuture.gov.ae (Subject : IROS2026-MoMA4 Workshop Contribution | Corresponding Author Name | University/Industry Name)**

Awards

• Best Poster Award: 500$ USD

Sponsors