CRAS 2026

The 15th edition of CRAS will take place at the University of Leeds, in Leeds, UK from September 16 to 18, 2026.

Call for Papers

Surgical robotics continues to transform clinical practice by providing surgical teams with advanced tools for improved safety, reproducibility, precision, and ergonomics. Over the past three decades, millions of patients have benefitted from robotically assisted procedures, and recent years have seen a surge in commercially available systems for diverse indications. Despite this progress, significant research opportunities remain, including:

Extending the benefit of robot-assisted manipulation to new indications for broader health impact.

Simplifying concepts and devices to make surgical robotics accessible to more clinical centres worldwide and not only in high-resource settings.

Opening new possibilities for surgeons to invent novel procedures through miniaturization, minimal invasiveness, and partial autonomy.

This 15th edition of CRAS invites contributions that advance these goals using new technologies and approaches in robot assisted surgery.

Special Focus for 2026

This year we particularly encourage submissions addressing these themes:

Magnetics in surgical robotics: including magnetic actuation for minimally invasive interventions, magnetic sensor design for enhanced localization and control, and novel magnetically active robotic systems.

Enhancing surgical perception: including surgical vision, scene augmentation via mixed reality and haptic feedback, and integration of real-time diagnostic measurement techniques to support precision surgery and immediate decision-making during interventions.

Autonomy in surgery: including algorithms and architectures for shared control, supervised autonomy and fully autonomous tasks that improve workflow efficiency, reduce cognitive load and enable new levels of surgical precision.

Soft robotics for surgery: including novel design, modelling and control approaches for soft and continuum surgical robots, growing (vine) robots, soft sensors and interfaces, and robotics at small scales (untethered micro- and nano-robotics).

Extended abstracts (2 pages) discussing new technologies for computer or robot-assisted surgery across all clinical indications are solicited. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

Learning approaches for Registration, Segmentation, Modelling, Sensing and Control.
Novel Robotic Hardware and Sensors for Diagnosis and Intervention.
Motion Compensation, Active Guidance and Task Autonomy.
Human-Robot Collaboration and Shared Control.
Augmented and Mixed Reality, Tactile and Haptic Feedback, and Novel Interfaces.
Surgical Workflow Analysis, Training and Skill Assessment.

Magnetics in Surgery: Tethered/Untethered Robots, Sensing, Localisation and Control.
Robotic Endoscopes and Catheters for Diagnostic and Interventional Procedures.
Soft, Continuum and Growing (Vine) Robots, and Variable Stiffness Robotic Systems.
Robotics at small scales: Microsurgery, Micro-/Nano-Robotics.
Standardization and Regulation, Safety and Dependability, and Usability and User-Acceptance.
Teleproctoring and Telesurgery

Important Dates

Submission system opens:	Monday 19^th January
2 pages extended abstract submission deadline:	Thursday 30^th April
Notification of abstract acceptance:	Friday 12^th June
Early Bird registration deadline:	Friday 17^th July
Oral and poster registration deadline:	Friday 17^th July
Revised extended abstract submission deadline:	Friday 14^th August
Conference registration deadline:	Monday 21^st August
CoSur Summer School and CRAS:	Monday 14^th – Friday 18^th September

Submission Guidelines

2 pages Extended Abstracts.
Abstracts must be submitted via CMT here.
For more information on how to create a CMT account, click here.
For more information on how to submit an abstract, click here.
Abstract acceptance for oral or poster presentation is conditional upon at least one author registering for the conference by Monday 21 August 2026 to present. Abstracts without a registered presenting author after this date will be omitted from the final meeting programmes
For advance information, posters should be in the following format: A0 portrait (w 841mm x h 1189mm).

The Microsoft CMT service was used for managing the peer-reviewing process for this conference. This service was provided for free by Microsoft and they bore all expenses, including costs for Azure cloud services as well as for software development and support.

Templates

Please follow the template for your final paper. A template can be downloaded here (docx or Latex).
A template for poster presentation can be downloaded here (pptx or Latex).
A template for oral presentation or poster pitch can be downloaded here (pptx).