GOALS@ICAPS Recap

Several members of GOALS participated in ICAPS 2026 through the Summer School, workshops, and the main conference.

Kate Lampo, Charlotte Reed, and Peter Lacaze attended the ICAPS 2026 Summer School. Peter also remained for the main conference. 

The summer school was a great opportunity to both revisit the foundations and expand my horizons in planning and scheduling! I particularly enjoyed the chance to implement some of the concepts we learned about in the once-daily lab sessions, and to meet other students within and beyond robotics that work on similar topics. – Kate Lampo

Luigi Bonassi contributed to several events throughout ICAPS 2026. He delivered an invited talk at the Doctoral Consortium, where he discussed his thesis and experience as a PhD student. At the KEPS 2026 workshop, he presented the group’s research on Parity and Hard Choices. He was also invited to give a short presentation during the community awards after receiving an Honorable Mention for the ICAPS Dissertation Award. Finally, Luigi served as an organiser of the numeric track of the 2026 International Planning Competition. The aim of the competition is to evaluate the next generation of numeric planners developed by the planning community on a set of novel benchmarks. Luigi contributed to the design of the benchmark suite, the evaluation of participating planners, and the presentation of the competition outcomes with the other organisers at the conference.

Nick Hawes delivered two key talks during ICAPS 2026. First, he gave the invited talk at the PlanRob workshop on the group’s research on underwater gliders. Then, he was the keynote speaker on the opening day of the main conference, where he presented how he thinks about robot planning problems, as well as the group's past achievements and the current directions we are investigating.