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.
Grocery robot
On top of a FANUC CRX10ia, we built the sensing, AI, XAI and planning ourselves, together with KU Leuven Augment. The robot has a sense of touch, recognises objects and estimates their pose, explains its own failures back to the user through XAI, and plans in real time with human detection so it can work safely around people.
That combination is what lets it operate in a cluttered, unstructured environment, right next to visitors. No cage, no fence.
Mathieu De Coster and Dries Marzougui built the demo. Vero Vanden Abeele and Rasim Mehdiyev led the XAI work on the KU Leuven Augment side. Andreas Verleysen and Francis wyffels were on the booth across both days, handing out socks and talking to visitors.
CATS, a tangram-playing UR3e
CATS is a UR3e that plays tangram, with a 500 Hz compliance loop and multimodal proximity reflexes so it can handle contact safely. 3rd-year bachelor students Yente Pauwels, Kaat Verheye and Josse De Rudder designed and built it, together with Remko and Thomas from our team. Having undergrads co-build a booth demo like this is rare, and visitors made the most of it: two days of poking, pushing and second-guessing, and the robot held up.
Also at ITF
imec’s wider ITF World 2026 announcements were covered by Nieuwsblad and Trends. Both videos include shots of our booth demos.
What’s next
We’ll bring both demos back at events later in 2026.