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

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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Workshop on Local Generative AI for Education in Tanzania

Eva Verhelst and Mathieu De Coster recently travelled to Mzumbe University in Morogoro, Tanzania, to install a new GPU workstation and deliver a two-day workshop on running generative AI models locally for educational applications. The visit marks a small but meaningful anniversary: the server room that now houses the workstation was inaugurated almost exactly ten years ago by the Belgian ambassador at the time, Paul Cartier. A decade later, the same room is hosting a new generation of hardware, this time dedicated to generative AI research and teaching in Tanzania.
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