Welcome to the

Workshop on Whole-body Control and Bimanual Manipulation: Applications in Humanoids and Beyond

at RSS 2026

July 13, 2026


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About

WCBM @ RSS 2026

Motivation

Humanoid robots have long held promise to be seamlessly deployed in our daily lives. Despite the rapid progress in humanoid robots' hardware (e.g. Boston Dynamics Atlas, Tesla Optimus, Unitree H1, 1X Neo, Agility Digit), their software is fully or partially hand-designed for specific tasks. The goal of Whole-body Control and Bimanual Manipulation (WCBM) workshop is to provide a platform for roboticists and machine learning researchers to discuss the past achievements of whole-body control and manipulation as well as future research directions on this topic, especially on the problem of enabling autonomous humanoid robots. We invited a group of speakers who are world-renowned experts to present their work on whole-body control for humanoid robots and bimanual robotic systems. We also want to provide researchers with the opportunity to present their latest research by accepting workshop papers. We will review and select the best submissions for spotlight talks and interactive poster presentations. We have also planned guided panel discussions to encourage debate among the invited speakers and workshop participants. In the discussion, we would like to contrast the viewpoints of machine learning researchers and roboticists on the past and future of this research topic.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact us.

Program

Workshop schedule


TimeEvent
  09:00  -   09:05Opening Remark
  09:05  -   09:30Joohyung Kim (UIUC)
  09:30  -   09:55Jianyu Chen (Tsinghua)
  09:55  -   10:20Tony Zhao (Sunday Robotics)
  10:20  -   10:45Karen Liu (Stanford)
  10:45  -   11:15Coffee Break and Poster Session
  11:15  -   11:40Spotlight Talks
  11:40  -   12:10Panel Discussion
  12:10  -   12:30Closing Remarks

Talks

Invited Speakers

Joohyung Kim

Joohyung Kim is an Associate Professor of ECE (Electrical and Computer Engineering) and MechSE (Mechanical Science & Engineering), and the director of KIMLAB (Kinetic Intelligent Machine LAB) at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on design and control for humanoid robots, system for motion learning in robot hardware, and safe human-robot interaction. He received BSE and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) from Seoul National University, Korea, in 2001 and 2012. He was with Disney Research as a Research Scientist from 2013 to 2019. Prior to joining Disney, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University for DARPA Robotics Challenge in 2013. From 2009 to 2012, he was a Research Staff Member in Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology and Samsung Electronics, Korea, developing biped walking controllers for humanoid robots.

Jianyu Chen

Jianyu Chen is an assistant professor in Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences (IIIS) at Tsinghua University. Prior to that, he was working with Prof. Masayoshi Tomizuka at the University of California, Berkeley and received my Ph.D. degree in 2020. He received his Bachelor degree from Tsinghua University in 2015. He runs the Intelligent Systems and Robotics Laboratory (ISR Lab), where they are working at an intersection of artificial intelligence and robotics to build advanced robotic systems with high performance and high intelligence. His research interests include reinforcement learning, robotics, control, and autonomous driving. ​

Tony Zhao

Tony Zhao is the co-founder and CEO of Sunday Robotics. He previously worked on ALOHA and ACT ​at Stanford before dropping out.

Keran Liu

Karen Liu is a professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. Prior to joining Stanford, Liu was a faculty member at the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. She received her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Washington. Liu's research interests are in computer graphics and robotics, including physics-based animation, character animation, optimal control, reinforcement learning, and computational biomechanics. She developed computational approaches to modeling realistic and natural human movements, learning complex control policies for humanoids and assistive robots, and advancing fundamental numerical simulation and optimal control algorithms. The algorithms and software developed in her lab have fostered interdisciplinary collaboration with researchers in robotics, computer graphics, mechanical engineering, biomechanics, neuroscience, and biology. Liu received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and was named Young Innovators Under 35 by Technology Review. In 2012, Liu received the ACM SIGGRAPH Significant New Researcher Award for her contribution in the field of computer graphics.

Organization

Workshop Organizers

Pieter Abbeel

Pieter Abbeel

Professor at UC Berkeley
Carlo Sferrazza

Carlo Sferrazza

Incoming Assistant professor at UT Austin, Research Scientist at Amazon
Youngwoon Lee

Youngwoon Lee

Assistant Professor at Yonsei Unviersity
Toru Lin

Toru Lin

PhD at UC Berkeley
Ziwen Zhuang

Ziwen Zhuang

PhD at Tsinghua
Bike Zhang

Bike Zhang

Postdoc at UC Berkeley

Calls

Call for papers

We welcome submissions of full papers as well as work-in-progress and accept submissions of work recently published or currently under review.

In general, we encourage two types of papers:

  • Empirical paper: Submissions should focus on presenting original research, case studies or novel implementations in the fields related to the workshop (see potential topics below).
  • Position paper: Authors are encouraged to submit papers that discuss critical and thought-provoking topics within the scientific community.
Potential topics include:
  • Reinforcement learning for whole-body control and bimanual manipulation
  • Teleoperation systems for humanoid robots (or other complex robotic systems) and imitation learning
  • Learning models (e.g. dynamics, perception) and planning for complex, mobile robotic systems
  • Benchmark and task proposals for whole-body control and manipulation
  • Multimodal, whole-body sensing and perception
  • Simulation to real world transfer
  • Learning from human videos
Important Dates
  • Submission deadline: June 8, 2026
  • Notification of acceptance: June 18, 2026
  • Camera-ready papers due: June 30, 2026
  • All deadlines are AoE time.
Submission Guidelines

Submission link will be available soon.

Accepted papers will be presented as posters, and a subset of them will be selected for oral presentation.

There is no page limit but recommended 4-8 pages (excluding references and appendix). Submissions must follow the template and style and should be properly anonymized.

Dual Submission Policy

We welcome papers that have never been submitted, are currently under review, or recently published. Accepted papers will be published on the workshop homepage, but will not be part of the official proceedings and are to be considered non-archival.

Workshops

Previous editions