Overview

Robot-assisted surgery (RAS) is now increasingly deployed and delivers clear gains in precision, stability, and ergonomics, in comparison to conventional approaches. Yet these advancements also reveal several bottlenecks, such as sustaining optimal views, exposure, and coordination, still demanding intensive micromanagement by the surgeon amid patient and workflow variability, work that typically falls to an expert assistant. To reduce reliance on a dedicated assistant and enable a reliable single-surgeon workflow, we focus on “Intelligent Robotic Assistants” that fuse Embodied-AI perception, surgeon-intention recognition, and verifiable shared/autonomous control to offload camera steering, atraumatic tissue exposure, and context-aware guidance during surgical task execution.

Specifically, recent advances in embodied intelligence, spanning advanced control frameworks, learning-based perception and policy optimization, and generative models for planning, offer a concrete path to address these challenges. By convening academic researchers, industry, and clinicians, this workshop will catalyze cross-disciplinary progress toward next-generation “Robotic Assistants” across diverse surgeries and interventional procedures. In parallel, we will examine opportunities, challenges, and ethical/regulatory considerations, and define evaluation protocols and translational pathways to convert these technical advances into clinically viable, trustworthy solutions.

Invited Speakers

Call for Papers

Submission Tips
We invite the author to submit a PDF version of the abstract (up to 2 pages, following the ICRA double-column format). Each submission will undergo single-blind peer review by experts in related field. Accepted submissions will be presented during the poster sessions and archived on the website. We will present Outstanding Presentation Awards to honor the contributions.

Please note that in-person attendance at the workshop for poster presentation is required.

The abstract should be submitted via the OpenReview Platform.

Contact: junling.fu@polimi.it, huanyu.tian@kcl.ac.uk

Important Dates

• Submission opening: 1st March, 2026.

• Submission deadline: 20th April, 2026.

• Notification: 5th May, 2026.

• Workshop Date: 5th June, 2026.

Topics of Interest
Detailed topics include, but are not limited to:

• Telerobotics and Teleoperation Control       

• Shared Control and Shared Autonomy for Assistance

• Learning Techniques for Assistance and Autonomous Surgery

• Computer Vision for Surgical Navigation and Context Awareness

• Surgical Workflow Recognition for Adaptive Robotic Assistance

• Multimodal Interaction Feedback in Robot-assisted Surgery, e.g., AR, Haptic, and LLM

• Foundation Models for Medical Robot Systems, e.g., VLM, and VLA

• Advanced Sensing, Robot Design, and Path Planning Approaches

• Evaluation of Cognitive Workloads and Ergonomics in Robot-assisted Surgery

• Safety, Clinical Applicability, and Ethical Considerations

Disclaimer
The copyright ownership of submissions remains with the respective authors. As the copyright holders, authors retain exclusive authority over their work, which encompasses the right to republish it in conferences or journals, reuse portions, and adapt it for future works.

Organizers