Four decades after the first IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Atlanta, robotics is bigger than ever. Next week in Rotterdam is the IEEE ICRA@40 conference, “a celebration of 40 years of pioneering research and technological advancements in robotics and automation.” There’s an ICRA every year, of course. Arguably the largest robotics research conference in the world, the 2024 edition was held in Yokohama, Japan back in May.

ICRA@40 is not just a second ICRA conference in 2024. Next week’s conference is a single track that promises “a journey through the evolution of robotics and automation,” through four days of short keynotes from prominent roboticists from across the entire field. You can see for yourself, the speaker list is nuts. There are also debates and panels tackling big ideas, like: “What progress has been made in different areas of robotics and automation over the past decades, and what key challenges remain?” Personally, I’d say “lots” and “most of them,” but that’s probably why I’m not going to be up on stage.

There will also be interactive research presentations, live demos, an expo, and more—the conference schedule is online now, and the abstracts are online as well. I’ll be there to cover it all, but if you can make it in person, it’ll be worth it.

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Forty years ago is a long time, but it’s not that long, so just for fun, I had a look at the proceedings of ICRA 1984 which are available on IEEE Xplore, if you’re curious. Here’s an excerpt of the forward from the organizers, which included folks from International Business Machines and Bell Labs:

The proceedings of the first IEEE Computer Society International Conference on Robotics contains papers covering practically all aspects of robotics. The response to our call for papers has been overwhelming, and the number of papers submitted by authors outside the United States indicates the strong international interest in robotics.
The Conference program includes papers on: computer vision; touch and other local sensing; manipulator kinematics, dynamics, control and simulation; robot programming languages, operating systems, representation, planning, man-machine interfaces; multiple and mobile robot systems.
The technical level of the Conference is high with papers being presented by leading researchers in robotics. We believe that this conference, the first of a series to be sponsored by the IEEE, will provide a forum for the dissemination of fundamental research results in this fast developing field.

Technically, this was “ICR,” not “ICRA,” and it was put on by the IEEE Computer Society’s Technical Committee on Robotics, since there was no IEEE Robotics and Automation Society at that time; RAS didn’t get off the ground until 1987.

1984 ICR(A) had two tracks, and featured about 75 papers presented over three days. Looking through the proceedings, you’ll find lots of familiar names: Harry Asada, Ruzena Bajcsy, Ken Salisbury, Paolo Dario, Matt Mason, Toshio Fukuda, Ron Fearing, and Marc Raibert. Many of these folks will be at ICRA@40, so if you see them, make sure and thank them for helping to start it all, because 40 years of robotics is definitely something to celebrate.