Call for Papers

Please contact the symposium organizers with questions.

Soft robotics has made tremendous strides over recent years, with new forms of soft structures, actuators, sensors, and control strategies paving the way for physical intelligence. However, the field still faces challenges in power, performance, and control due to limited material availability. To overcome these limitations, researchers are turning to nature for inspiration. Multifunctionality is the key to building emergent autonomous behavior that can integrate distributed actuation, perception, control, and energy capabilities in robotic agents. This requires new material design paradigms that can tightly integrate multiple robotic capabilities to create functional materials that can perform tasks without human intervention. The symposium aims to bring together experts from materials science, soft robotics, chemistry, and mechanics to achieve this interdisciplinary vision. By collaborating across these fields, researchers can build beyond the current visions of robotic materials and create truly autonomous ones. The potential applications of this technology are vast, from soft robots that can perform delicate surgical procedures to autonomous systems that can monitor and repair infrastructure. As the field continues to advance, we can expect to see more innovative solutions that push the boundaries of what is possible with soft robotics. This innovative approach provides research opportunities where both theory and experiments can produce discoveries and potential applications in Material Science and Engineering, such as self-cleaning and functionalized actuators for AR, VR XR applications, environmentally adaptive surfaces, enduring and agile robots, responsive surfaces to communicate biological markers, situation adaptive protective gear and more.

Topics will include:

• Materials with distributed and/or embodied sensorimotor behaviors
• Soft material logic and neuromorphic computation
• Stimuli-responsive hydrogels, liquid crystalline materials, and composites
• Architected materials and Soft Robotic Materials
• Additive and digital fabrication of multifunctional and programmable materials
• Modeling, simulation, and control of autonomous materials
• Self-healing, self-regulatory, and homeostatic materials
• Autonomous soft, bioinspired, and/or microscale robots
• Embodied energy and materials for energy scavenging

Invited Speakers (tentative):

• Amir H. Alavi (University of Pittsburgh, USA)
• Tommy Angelini (University of Florida, USA)
• Bilge Baytekin (Bilkent University, Turkey)
• Phil Buskohl (Air Force Research Laboratory, USA)
• Alfred J. Crosby (University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA)
• Monica O. De La Cruz (Northwestern University, USA)
• Michael Dickey (North Carolina State University, USA)
• Kristen Dorsey (Northeastern University, USA)
• Amir D. Gat (Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, Israel)
• Daniel I. Goldman (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA)
• Francesco Greco (Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Italy)
• Ryan Hayward (University of Colorado Boulder, USA)
• Josie Hughes (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland)
• Mirko Kovac (Imperial College London, United Kingdom)
• Shlomo Magdassi (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel)
• Barbara Mazzolai (Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, USA)
• Shingo Meada (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan)
• Ankur mehta (University of California, Los Angeles, USA)
• Markus P. Nemitz (Worcester Polytechnic Institute, USA)
• Abdon Pena-Francesch (University of Michigan, USA)
• Kirstin Petersen (Cornell University, USA)
• James Pikul (University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA)
• Jordan Raney (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
• Sheila Russo (Boston University, USA)
• Francesco Giorgio Serchi (University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom)
• Herbert Shea (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland)
• Nancy Sottos (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)
• Timothy J. White (University of Colorado Boulder, USA)
• Renee Zhao (Stanford University, USA)

Symposium Organizers