IROS 2026 Best Paper Award Goes to a Newly Established Lab: Robots Now Have Long-Term Memory Framework

The Best Paper Award at IROS 2026 was given to research on long-term memory for robots, which introduced the LT-Mem framework. This framework addresses the issue of robots being unable to track object trajectories when entering the same room multiple times. The framework updates memory using a fluctuating score and performs well on the LT-VQA dataset, outperforming several baseline models. The research was conducted by the APRL lab at DGIST in South Korea, which was established less than a year ago. The two main authors enrolled in July 2025.