Join us with @UnitreeRobotics for a relaxing evening of drinks and canapes in Sydney during #RSS2026 with leading researchers, labs and operators from across the world. Link below to RSVP, sign up quickly space is limited!

Sydney-bound for #RSS2026, and not gonna lie, we’re buzzing! 🔥 On our slate: OpenDriveLab.com/rss2026/ 🎤 Dr. Hongyang Li — Early Career Spotlight 📄 Two papers we're proud of: RISE & EgoHumanoid 🤖 A humanoid doing real work on the floor - July 13th Morning Workshop Full rundown where to find us 👇 medium.com/@opendrivelab/ope… Come have a yarn. #EmbodiedAI #WholebodyIntelligence #VLA #WorldModels #Sydney #ICC

Just had a single-author paper accepted to #RSS2026! arxiv.org/abs/2604.21456 Motivated by growing interest in differentiable world models and physics simulators, we ask whether there is a unified principle for combining sampling-based global “exploration” with gradient-based local “exploitation” in trajectory and policy optimization with differentiable dynamics. By viewing control through the control-as-inference lens—recasting optimization as sampling from an unnormalized Boltzmann distribution defined by an energy function—Tempered Sequential Monte Carlo (TSMC) naturally integrates importance sampling with gradient-based Hamiltonian Monte Carlo. The key idea behind TSMC is to define a tempering path that gradually transforms an easy-to-sample prior into a complex, multi-modal posterior—or equivalently, deforms a convex energy landscape into a nonconvex one (graduated non-convexity)! We implement TSMC for both trajectory and policy optimization. On small- to medium-scale problems, it appears broadly applicable and compares favorably with state-of-the-art baselines. Excited to explore whether TSMC can scale to large-scale planning with complex, high-dimensional dynamics!

#RSS2026 Workshop on Whole-Body Control & Bimanual Manipulation: Applications in Humanoids & Beyond 🤖👽🦾 Deadline extended & speaker updated! You now have until Jun 15 (a week after ICRA/CVPR) to submit :D look forward to your work! wcbm-workshop.github.io @RoboticsSciSys

The #RSS2026 Early Career Spotlight speakers are now online! Congratulations to: • Wenzhen Yuan @wenzhenyuan382 • Marco Tognon @marco_tognon • Pulkit Agrawal @pulkitology • Hongyang Li @francislee2020 Learn more about their talks: roboticsconference.org/progr… See you in Sydney! 🤖

Get hands-on with #PiPER-X at #RSS2026 🤖 Lightweight 6-DoF robotic arm with a highly dexterous spherical wrist for advanced #manipulation and #robotics R&D in constrained spaces. ±0.1mm repeatability • 1.5kg payload • ROS & SDK ready 📍ICC Sydney | Booth B2 | July 13–17

Check out our recent work accepted to #RSS2026! We enable a robot to learn a flying knot from a single human demonstration and less than 10 trials using Task-Level Iterative Learning Control: flying-knots.github.io/

The #RSS2026 venue is hard to beat: ICC Sydney in Darling Harbour, right by the waterfront and surrounded by restaurants, transit, and some of Sydney’s most iconic walks. The robotics community will come together in such a vibrant setting! roboticsconference.org/atten…