CRAS 2026
The 15th edition of CRAS will take place at the University of Leeds, UK, on 16 to 18 September 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
Journal Special Issues
As part of CRAS 2026, authors of accepted abstracts aligned with the theme "Magnetics in Surgical Robotics" will be invited to submit full-length manuscripts to Magnetic Medicine (ISSN: 2950-5844). Contributions are encouraged from, but not limited to, the following areas: magnetic medical/surgical devices; magnetically active soft-/ micro-/nano-robots for surgery; magnetic sensing and localization; and magnetic actuation systems.
Submissions will undergo standard peer review and, if accepted, will be considered for prioritized publication in the special issue "Magnetics in Surgical Robotics" of the journal. All manuscripts invited through CRAS 2026 will be published with no article processing charges (APCs).
Additionally, for authors of accepted abstracts aligned with conference themes of "Enhancing surgical perception", "Autonomy in surgery", or "Soft robotics for surgery" will be invited to submit full-length manuscripts to a special collection in Advanced Robotics Research (ISSN:2943-973) on the topic of "Robotics for Healthcare and Surgical applications"
Advanced Robotics Research publishes Research Articles, Reviews and Perspective articles. Manuscripts submitted to the special collection will undergo standard review process and will be subject to standard article processing charges (APCs).
COSUR 2026: Summer School on Control of Surgical Robots
CRAS 2026 will also host CoSuR, the Summer School on Control of Surgical Robots, offering early-career researchers training in robot-assisted surgery through lectures, tutorials, and clinical perspectives on control, sensing, imaging, autonomy, and AI. Further details will be available on the CoSuR page.
Important Dates
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 27th July 2026 to present. Abstracts without a registered presenting author after this date will be omitted from the final conference programme.
- 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
CRAS 2026 Keynote Speakers
Prof. David Jayne
Professor of Surgery, University of Leeds
Hon. Consultant Surgeon, Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust
David is Bowel Cancer UK & RCS Engl. Professor of Surgery at the University of Leeds and Hon. Consultant Surgeon at LTHT. His clinical interests include robotic and minimally invasive surgery for colorectal cancer. He is Chief Investigator for several NIHR portfolio clinical trials, including MRC/EME/NIHR ROLARR, HTA/NIHR FIAT, HTA/NIHR SaFaRI, and MRC/EME/NIHR IntAct. He is Director of Leeds Institute for Medical Research, Clinical Director of the Leeds NIHR HealthTech Research Centre, and Clinical Director for the Leeds RCS Eng. Surgical Trials Centre. He sits on several funding panels, including NIHR Advanced Fellowships, NIHR i4i PDA, and NHSE/SBRI Cancer Innovations Awards. His translational research interests include the development and early phase evaluation of surgical technologies.
Prof. Dan Stoyanov
Professor of Robot Vision, University College London
Chief Scientist for Digital Surgery at Medtronic
Abstract title: Translating Surgical AI Research into Medical Devices
Dan Stoyanov is a Professor at UCL Computer Science and Co-Director of the UCL Hawkes Institute. His research is focused on surgical AI and robotics with a particular focus on computer vision in surgical endoscopy and minimally invasive surgery. He is a Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Technologies, in addition to leading large-scale projects from the Wellcome Trust and EPSRC. He is Chief Scientist at Digital Surgery (acquired by Medtronic plc); and co-founder of Odin Vision Ltd (acquired by Olympus), Panda Surgical Ltd, Enacuity Ltd, Helico Technologies Ltd, and Invexo Ltd. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, Academy of Medical Sciences, IEEE, IET and the MICCAI Society.
Prof. Brad Nelson
Professor of Robotics and Intelligent Systems,
ETH Zurich
Co-Founder, Nanoflex Robotics, Ophthorobotics
Abstract title: Clinically Ready Microrobots
Brad Nelson has been the Professor of Robotics and Intelligent Systems at ETH Zürich since 2002, where his research focuses on micro, nano, and medical robotics. He studied mechanical engineering at Illinois and Minnesota, worked in computer vision at Honeywell and software engineering at Motorola, taught mathematics in Botswana, Africa, and then obtained a Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University. At ETH Zürich, Nelson has built an internationally respected research group known for turning fundamental questions into working systems. His laboratory has become a training ground for researchers who value both rigorous science and practical impact, and many of his former students and collaborators now lead their own efforts in academia, industry, and medicine. His work on microrobots has helped move the field from conceptual demonstrations toward clinical relevance.
Dr. Massimiliano Simi
Executive VP of R&D,
Medical Microinstruments, Inc.
Abstract title: Robotic Open Microsurgery: Past, Present and Future
Dr. Massimiliano (Max) Simi is Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of MMI, bringing over 15 years of leadership in surgical robotics. Driven by a passion for innovation, he invented the proprietary NanoWrist instrument—the foundation of MMI's patent portfolio—and continues to direct Researchband Product Development and upgrades for the flagship Symani Surgical System and Synaptix visualization platform. Prior to co-founding MMI, Max served as Engineer, delivering advanced robotic and mechatronic solutions to Silicon Valley medical device startups. He holds a Ph.D. in Innovative Technologies and Medical Robotics from the prestigious Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa, an Executive MBA, and both an M.S. and B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Pisa.
Prof. Stefanie Speidel
Professor in Translational Oncology,
National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT) Dresden
Abstract title: Beyond the Scalpel: From Intelligent Assistance to Autonomous Surgery
Stefanie Speidel is a Professor for Translational Surgical Oncology and director at the National Center for Tumor Diseases Dresden since 2017 as well as one of the speakers of the DFG Cluster of Excellence CeTI and the Konrad Zuse AI school SECAI. She received her PhD from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in 2009 and had a junior research group Computer-Assisted Surgery from 2012 - 2016. She is board secretary of the MICCAI society and fellow, has co-authored 170+ publications, organizes key workshops and challenges, and has served as general as well as program chair for major international conferences including IPCAI and MICCAI. Her research focuses on machine learning for image- and robot-assisted surgery.
Prof. Christian Duriez
Research Director, INRIA
CEO for Compliance Robotics
Abstract title: From surgical simulation to active anatomical models: soft robotics applied to surgery
Christian Duriez received a Ph.D. in robotics from CEA and the University of Évry, France, in 2004. He was a postdoctoral fellow with the CIMIT SimGroup in Boston, MA, USA. In 2006, he joined Inria Lille–Nord Europe (Villeneuve-d’Ascq, France), where he worked on interactive simulation of deformable objects and haptic rendering, with a focus on surgical simulation. In 2014, he was promoted to Directeur de Recherche and is currently the head of the DEFROST Team, created in January 2015. In 2018, he was an invited researcher at Stanford University (Stanford, CA, USA). He contributed to the creation of the open-source SOFA framework. He also co-founded the companies InSimo (2013) and Compliance Robotics (2024). His research interests include soft robot modeling and control, fast finite-element methods, and simulation of contact response. He is also interested in using soft robots for haptics.