Welcome to AIRO

IDLab AIRO Ghent University – imec

AIRO is a research team part of the research group IDLab. Our team is led by Prof. Joni Dambre, Prof. Francis wyffels, and Prof. Tony Belpaeme. Together with our team of researchers and students, we work on interdisciplinary research in the fields of AI and Robotics, ranging from social robotics to fringe machine learning. The lab has vast experience with neural networks and ended up several times as a winning team in international Kaggle competitions on image recognition.

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News

Grip->It, a new robot gripper competition for secondary schools

IDLab-AIRO is a partner in Grip->It, a new STEM project by Dwengo for students in the fifth and sixth year of secondary school. In teams, students design, build and program a robot gripper and try to pick up as many everyday objects as possible. The pilot year runs in 2026-2027 and ends with a first Grip->It competition.
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A grocery robot at Love Tomorrow, Tomorrowland 2026

Summer is festival season, and we like taking our robots into the field. AZorg invited us to Love Tomorrow, the sustainability and innovation platform of Tomorrowland. We brought the grocery demo, festival edition: visitors spin a wheel of fortune, and the robot finds the prize, grasps it and hands it over. Fully autonomous.
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AIRO at ICRA 2026 in Vienna

This year, the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), one of the world’s largest robotics conferences, took place in Vienna, Austria. AIRO was again well represented, contributing 3 conference papers and 3 workshop papers.
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Robot helpers in human-close environments at imec ITF World 2026

Two days at imec ITF World 2026: a grocery robot handing out goodies, and a tangram-playing robot built by our students. Both demos ran in a cluttered, unstructured setting next to thousands of visitors. No cage, no fence.
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2026 VALE Workshop

We are pleased to announce the Fourth International Workshop on Value Engineering in AI (VALE ‘26), which will take place in Bremen, Germany, as part of the 35th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 15-17 August 2026.
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