"Robotics and automation" is a pairing heard often around these parts. It puts the "RA" in IEEE RAS, after all. The familiar combination shows up in conference titles, funding calls, and program descriptions. But what is actually meant by the two words? Is robotics a subdomain of automation?

The 2026 IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA) was held in Vienna from the 1 - 5 June. The event brought together researchers and industry professionals with expertise spanning many different aspects of robotics. IEEE have made the keynote and plenary talk recordings available to watch . You can also catch the panel discussions and keynote tutorials. Panel 4 - Publish or Perish: Surviving the Paper Deluge - Is AI the solution?

In early August, The Information published an article that claimed U.S.-based founders, investors and startups, are travelling to an electronics market in Shenzhen to buy servomotors, sensors, controllers and gimbals. The report also claimed that Unitree and Zhiyuan robots are being bought intact, then stripped down into parts and carried back to the USA in suitcases. By late August, in a separate development, reports emerged that a US Department of Energy lab is investigating whether Chinese LiDAR sensors pose a security risk, if widely used on vehicles in the United States. According to TechCrunch, the research is being funded by one or more companies in the electric and autonomous vehicle industries. Don't cancel any Shenzhen travel plans just yet, but engineers at Princeton have unveiled a motorless, origami-inspired robot that can roll, crawl, and change shape through a combination of magnetic control and multistable geometry.

A recent ICRA panel titled "Surviving the Paper Deluge" brought together leading robotics researchers who have grappled with the overwhelming number of robotics papers being published today . The discussion ranged from hard numbers on publication growth, through the promises and risks of large language models (LLMs), to radical proposals for reshaping peer review as we know it. Panel chair Aude Billard pointed to rapid growth across major IEEE Robotics and Automation Society venues, with a roughly exponential curve beginning around 2017. An estimate for 2025 suggests around 70,000 papers containing the word "robotics." Billard noted that while in some fields, extreme specialization may be an acceptable survival strategy, robotics is inherently different.

How green is your robot? Robots clean rivers and sort waste, monitor ecosystems, and inspect renewable-energy infrastructure . But even the greenest robot has an environmental footprint. Across a full lifecycle, from rare earth mineral extraction and manufacturing to operation and end-of-life, robots have an environmental impact. But the robotics community has, until now, lacked dedicated tools for calculating it.

In this section, we provide more information on the application backgrounds, including the detailed structures of the RAS and VAS, the structures of the simulated advertising system. We also discuss the importance and universality of the IBOO problem in auto-bidding, which acts as the motivation of this work.

Recently, auto-bidding technique has become an essential tool to increase the revenue of advertisers. Facing the complex and ever-changing bidding environments in the real-world advertising system (RAS), state-of-the-art auto-bidding policies usually leverage reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to generate realtime bids on behalf of the advertisers. Due to safety concerns, it was believed that the RL training process can only be carried out in an offline virtual advertising system (VAS) that is built based on the historical data generated in the RAS. In this paper, we argue that there exists significant gaps between the VAS and RAS, making the RL training process suffer from the problem of inconsistency between online and offline (IBOO). Firstly, we formally define the IBOO and systematically analyze its causes and influences. Then, to avoid the IBOO, we propose a sustainable online RL (SORL) framework that trains the auto-bidding policy by directly interacting with the RAS, instead of learning in the VAS. Specifically, based on our proof of the Lipschitz smooth property of the Q function, we design a safe and efficient online exploration (SER) policy for continuously collecting data from the RAS. Meanwhile, we derive the theoretical lower bound on the safety degree of the SER policy. We also develop a variance-suppressed conservative Q-learning (V-CQL) method to effectively and stably learn the auto-bidding policy with the collected data.

Definition (Inconsistencies between Specifically cannot constraint 2 ofthe3, which VAS second advertisers mark Essentially transitions performance R) A/Btest the RAS.