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

List of Accepted  Papers

Poster Session 1

1. STUPID Robot: Safe Task Understanding and Planning with Interactive Dialog for Robotic HIFU Systems
   Xiu Zhang, Alessandro Piccolo, Silvia Buratti, Junling Fu, Alessandro Diodato, Selene Tognarelli, Arianna Menciassi

2. Deformable State Estimation for Autonomous Surgical Tissue Retraction Under Partial Observability
   Everest Yang, Skye Thompson, George D. Konidaris

3. A Study on a Semi-Autonomous Surgical Assistant Collaborative Robot for Laparoscopic Surgery
   Taehoon Kim, Youqiang Zhang, Jongchan Mun, Sangrok Jin

4. Bio-Inspired 3D-Printable Continuum Robot: A Tendon-Driven Continuum Endoscope – Preliminary Cadaveric Trials for Colonoscopy
   Md Modassir Firdaus, Madhu Vadali, Branesh M. Pillai, Chumpon Wilasrusmee

5. Egocentric Learning for Bimanual Surgical Manipulation
   Eugenia Mawuenya Akpo, Shirui Lyu, Nicholas Raison, Christos Bergeles, Letizia Gionfrida

6. Strategy-Supervised Autonomous Laparoscopic Camera Control via Event-Driven Graph Mining
   Keyu Zhou, Yahao Wu, Shunlei Li

7. Toward Reliable Control of Two Section Continuum Robots
   Ivan Adi Kuncara, Ayoung Hong

8. Vision-Based Soft-Tissue Deformation Tracking for Adaptive Surgical Robot Behavior
   Gabriele Furnari, Elisa Iovene, Federica Ferraguti

9. Assessment of Workload and Ergonomics in Simulated Robot-Assisted Partial Nephrectomy
   Elisa Iovene, Deborah Cattafesta, Anna Emilia Candela, Vittorio Cuculo, Sara Moccia, Elena De Momi, Federica Ferraguti

10. A perspective on the use of Foundation Models in Surgical Data Science
    Deborah Cattafesta, Mariachiara Di Cosmo, Federica Ferraguti, Simona Tiribelli, Sara Moccia

11. EndoDDC: Learning Sparse to Dense Reconstruction for Endoscopic Robotic Navigation via Diffusion Depth Completion
    Yinheng Lin, Yiming Huang, Beilei Cui, Long Bai, Huxin Gao, Hongliang Ren, Jiewen Lai

12. Anatomical Landmark-Guided Deep Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Gastric Navigation
    Haoxuan Wu, Sishen Yuan, Haitao Gao, Zhen Li, Xiuli Zuo, Hongliang Ren

13. Learning to Cut: A Structure-Aware Transformer for Autonomous Surgical Tumor Removal
    Francesco Bigi, Gabriele Furnari, Elisa Iovene, Andrea Pupa, Cristian Secchi, Federica Ferraguti

14. Registration After Completion: Pose-Robust Completion for Sparse Partial Point Set Registration in Computer-Assisted Orthopedic Surgery
    Xinzhe Du, Shixing Ma, Shuwei Shao, Max Q.-H. Meng, Zhe Min

Poster Session 2

15. Real-Time Frame-Level Confidence Estimation for Stereo Disparity in Endoscopic Imaging
    Laura Cruciani, Sara Martuscelli, Matteo Magnani, Anna Emilia Candela, Elena De Momi

16. AnkleSurg: A Reinforcement Learning Environment for Robot Ankle Fracture Reduction Surgery
    Catherine Abraham, Sean R. Anderson, Sanjeev Madan, Molly Kennedy, Sanja Dogramadzi

17. Automatic Generation of Virtual Fixtures from Digital Twin for Teleoperated Lung Ultrasound
    Davide Nardi, Edoardo Lamon, Daniele Fontanelli, Matteo Saveriano, Luigi Palopoli

18. A Multifunctional Capsule and Magnetic Navigation Platform for Controlled Actuation and Task Execution in GI Environments
    Razan Abu-Shaera, Shivam Gupta, Veerash Palanichamy, Onaizah Onaizah

19. Towards Autonomous Tape Handling for Robotic Wound Redressing
    Xiao Liang, Lu Shen, Peihan Zhang, Soofiyan Atar, Florian Richter, Michael Yip

20. Feedback Matters: Augmenting Autonomous Dissection with Visual and Topological Feedback
    Chung-Pang Wang, Changwei Chen, Xiao Liang, Soofiyan Atar, Florian Richter, Michael Yip

21. Physics-Informed CT-to-US Translation via Biomechanical Strain and Conditional Diffusion Models
    Yizhao Qian, Jiayuan Luo, Li Liu

22. Continuously Multistable Mixed-Folded Tubes
    Sagi Senderovich, Ezra Ben-Abu, Shai Elbaz, Nadav Zemah, Amir D. Gat

23. From Scanning Guidelines to Action: A Robotic Ultrasound Agent with LLM-Based Reasoning
    Yuan Bi, Yiping Zhou, Pei Liu, Feng Li, Zhongliang Jiang, Nassir Navab

24. Bioinspired Kirigami Capsule Robot for Minimally Invasive Gastrointestinal Biopsy
    Ruizhou Zhao, Yichen Chu, Shuwei Zhao, Wenchao Yue, Raymond Shing-Yan Tang, Hongliang Ren

25. See, Plan, Cut: MPC-Based Autonomous Volumetric Robotic Laser Surgery with OCT Guidance
    Ravi Prakash, Vincent Y. Wang, Arpit Mishra, Devi Yuliarti, Pei Zhong, Ryan P. McNabb, Patrick J. Codd, Leila J. Bridgeman

26. DAISS: Phase-Aware Imitation Learning for Dual-Arm Robotic Ultrasound-Guided Interventions
    Feng Li, Pei Liu, Yuan Bi, Zhongliang Jiang, Nassir Navab

27. Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Target Reaching in Intracardiac Catheter Navigation
    Angela Peloso, Giulio Bella, Elena De Momi

28. Anatomy-Guided Autonomous Robotic Ultrasound Imaging: Learning Cross-Sectional Geometry Information
    Bo Wang, Giancarlo Ferrigno, Elena De Momi, Junling Fu

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 30th 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