Roberto Martín-Martín, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at UT Austin, has been awarded the prestigious 2026 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) Toshio Fukuda Young Professional Award. The award recognizes his pioneering contributions to learning-based manipulation, contact-rich control and physically interactive robot systems. Martín-Martín and fellow researchers earned a Best Mechanism Paper award at IROS in 2024 for their work on BaRiFlex: A Robotic Gripper with Versatility and Collision Robustness for Robot Learning.
The Toshio Fukuda Young Professional Award highlights outstanding individuals within the IROS community who have pioneered activities in robotics and intelligent systems early in their careers. The award adds to Martín-Martín's recent NSF CAREER Award which supports a multi-year project that tackles one of the toughest bottlenecks in robotics: enabling machines to continuously acquire new skills and adapt to fresh surroundings without wiping their existing memory or starting training from scratch.
“At this stage of my career, this recognition is an encouraging milestone that pushes me to continue in this direction,” said Martín-Martín. “I share it with my students and collaborators at UT Austin, whose creativity, ideas and persistence turn ambitious research into working robotic systems. They are the motor of my research.”
Martín-Martín credits extensive interdisciplinary collaboration across campus for enabling this work. He highlights key faculty and researchers in the School of Computing including Peter Stone, Joydeep Biswas, Yuke Zhu, George Konidaris, Ray Mooney and Kristen Grauman, as well as the broader Texas Robotics ecosystem, which fosters interdepartmental partnerships across engineering and science.
Learn more about collaborative research at Texas Robotics and the School of Computing.