Georgia Tech Leads as Robotics World Converges on Atlanta for ICRA 2025

The world’s largest robotics conference is coming to Atlanta, and 136 researchers and students from Georgia Tech will showcase their novel and groundbreaking contributions to a booming field.

The IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) will be held Monday through Friday at the Georgia World Congress Center.

“This is the flagship robotics conference,” said Seth Hutchinson, a former Georgia Tech professor who served as one of two general chairs for this year’s event. “Most of the robotics researchers you want to hear from or see will be at this conference.”

This includes faculty from Georgia Tech's colleges of Computing, Engineering, and Sciences, as well as the Georgia Tech Research Institute and the Institute for People and Technology.

[Explore Georgia Tech @ ICRA 2025]

ICRA will feature more than 2,000 presented research papers. Georgia Tech researchers authored or co-authored 57, including 18 written by faculty and students from the College of Computing.

In addition to the presented research, the conference will have demos, exhibitions, and robotics competitions throughout the week. The competitions include the Earth Rover Challenge for robot navigation over challenging terrain, the Quadruped Robot Challenges, and the Roboracer Autonomous Grand Prix.

More than 130 robotics companies and research institutes will showcase exhibitions. ICRA also hosts a career fair that Hutchinson said provides an excellent opportunity for Georgia Tech students interested in attending.

“We’re able to attract a lot of vendors. For researcher-oriented conferences, there’s no conference where you’ll see this many robotics companies showing up and showing off what they’re doing," he said.

"We have a massive career fair you don’t get at other conferences, so if you’re a student looking for work, this is a good place to be.”

Hutchinson, the former executive director of Tech’s Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines, said ICRA comes to Atlanta when worldwide interest in robotics is at an all-time high.

“My first year as IRIM director, there was very little activity happening in Atlanta with robotics,” he said. “There’s much more now. Some of that is robotics taking off everywhere, but some are people passing through Georgia Tech and hanging around in Atlanta working for tech companies or creating startups.

"Several things happening simultaneously have ignited robotics in Atlanta, and Georgia Tech is certainly a major driver of that.”

Roboticists from the College of Computing recently collaborated with Meta to teach robots new skills by mimicking actions from first-person videos of everyday activities.

ICRA returns to Atlanta for the first time since 1993 and will become the first city to host the event three times. Atlanta was also the first host city in 1984 when the conference was created.

Hutchinson expects a record-breaking attendance of about 7,000 in Atlanta next week.

He said pre-registration had surpassed 6,300 as of Monday, with a few hundred more expected to register on-site. IEEE student members can register on-site for $550; non-student members can register for $650.

For an in-depth, comprehensive look at the Georgia Tech research at ICRA, visit Georgia Tech’s research website dedicated to ICRA coverage.