The IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (IEEE RAS) is the preeminent international professional and technical society dedicated to advancing the theory, design, practice, and application of robotics, automation, and related technologies. Founded in 1984 as a successor to the IEEE Robotics and Automation Council, it serves a global membership of engineers, researchers, and practitioners through flagship conferences including ICRA and IROS, peer-reviewed publications such as the IEEE Transactions on Robotics, and technical committee activities that coordinate standards development and community building across the full breadth of robotics disciplines.
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- The IEEE Robotics and Automation Society traces its origins to the 1984 formation of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Council, which itself grew out of informal working groups that had been meeting at IEEE engineering conferences since the late 1970s as industrial robotics began its rapid expansion in automotive manufacturing. The Council was elevated to full Society status in 1987, reflecting the growing importance of robotics as an engineering discipline distinct from control theory or mechanical engineering. The society’s formation coincided with the publication of the first systematic textbooks on robot kinematics and the establishment of dedicated university robotics programmes in North America, Europe, and Japan.
- IEEE RAS organises the field through its flagship annual conferences: the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), typically attracting over 5,000 participants and receiving thousands of paper submissions annually, making it one of the highest-volume and most selective venues in computer science and engineering; and the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), a joint venture with the Robotics Society of Japan. The society’s flagship publication, IEEE Transactions on Robotics (TRO), publishes the highest-impact journal articles across robot design, control, planning, perception, and human-robot interaction. Additional publications include IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), which offers a faster-turnaround venue for shorter contributions with the option for ICRA/IROS presentation.
- The society’s technical committees — over 30 active groups covering topics from agricultural robotics to aerial robotics, robot learning, and robot ethics — coordinate research community activities, organise competitions such as the DARPA Robotics Challenge follow-on events, and feed into standards activities through IEEE’s standards association. IEEE standards developed with RAS involvement include IEEE 1872 (ontologies for robotics and automation), providing a common vocabulary for robot component interoperability, and contributions to IEC/ISO standards for collaborative robot safety (ISO 10218 and ISO/TS 15066).
- In 2024-2025, IEEE RAS has increasingly engaged with the convergence of large-scale AI foundation models and physical robotics — a development the community terms “embodied intelligence” or “foundation models for robotics.” ICRA 2024 and IROS 2024 saw record submissions on topics including robot learning from human demonstrations, multi-modal perception-action models, and sim-to-real transfer for generalised manipulation. The society has also intensified its attention to ethical dimensions of robotics deployment: autonomous weapons, care robots for vulnerable populations, and the labour market impacts of industrial automation are recurring themes in both technical committees and plenary addresses. RAS continues to serve as the convening institution that shapes research priorities and professional norms for a field whose societal impact is accelerating rapidly.