Soft and continuum robots offer unique advantages in contact-rich and safety-critical environments. However, their distributed deformation, high-dimensional configurations, and complex interactions introduce fundamental challenges in modeling, control, and perception. In particular, reliable state and force estimation remains inherently uncertain, as direct sensing is often impractical and inverse estimation problems are frequently ill-posed. Understanding, quantifying, and managing these uncertainties is essential for establishing trustworthy robotic intelligence and enabling safe real-world deployment.
SOFT Frontier 5: Trustworthy Intelligence for Soft Robots aims to bridge advances in soft robotic modeling, sensing, and intelligent control with practical applications. The workshop will address three interconnected themes: (1) Perception Under Uncertainty, exploring intrinsic force sensing, probabilistic inference, and uncertainty quantification; (2) Modeling and Control, investigating physics-based and data-driven approaches for reliable prediction and adaptive interaction; and (3) Surgical Robotics, examining the translation of trustworthy perception and control into safe, clinically applicable robotic systems. Through invited talks and interdisciplinary discussions, the workshop seeks to identify fundamental limitations, establish shared benchmarks for reliability and actionable confidence, and foster collaboration among researchers, clinicians, and industry.
The workshop is timely given rapid advances in soft robotic embodiment, multimodal sensing, and probabilistic machine learning, alongside growing demands for dependable medical robotic systems. Building on previous SOFT Frontier workshops at ICRA and IROS from 2024 to 2026, this fifth edition advances the discussion from adaptability and intelligent interaction toward uncertainty-aware intelligence and trustworthy clinical translation. It aligns primarily with the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Soft Robotics and Robot Control, reflecting its emphasis on deformable embodiment, reliable physical interaction, and medical applications.
Location: COEX, Seoul, South Korea