New Technologies for Computer and Robot-Assisted Surgery 2026

CRAS — the Conference on New Technologies for Computer and Robot Assisted Surgery — reaches its 15th edition at the University of Leeds from 16 to 18 September 2026, in the Esther Simpson Building on Lyddon Terrace. It is a small, focused, European research conference, and it exists for a specific reason that the organisers state plainly: surgical robotics is a mature commercial field, with thousands of systems installed worldwide and hundreds of thousands of robot-assisted procedures performed each year, yet the list of genuinely new technologies that have made it from the research lab into the operating theatre over the past decade remains short. Three-dimensional reconstruction, motion compensation, virtual guidance and haptic feedback have been studied in laboratories everywhere and have still not reached the market. CRAS was founded to attack that translation gap by getting the research groups working on these problems into the same room and keeping them talking.

The 2026 call sets out three explicit goals for contributions: extending robot-assisted manipulation to new clinical indications; simplifying devices so that surgical robotics reaches more clinical centres rather than only well-resourced ones; and opening new procedures through miniaturisation, minimal invasiveness and partial autonomy. That middle goal — accessibility — is a distinctive and welcome emphasis for a field that has largely optimised for high-end teaching hospitals.

Four special focus themes shape this year’s programme. The first is magnetics in surgical robotics: magnetic actuation for minimally invasive intervention, magnetic sensor design for localisation and control, and magnetically active robotic systems. The second is enhancing surgical perception: surgical vision, scene augmentation through mixed reality, haptic feedback, and the integration of real-time diagnostic measurement to support decisions made during an intervention. The third is autonomy in surgery: algorithms and architectures for shared control, supervised autonomy, and fully autonomous tasks that reduce a surgeon’s cognitive load. The fourth is soft robotics for surgery, spanning soft and continuum manipulators, growing (vine) robots, soft sensors, and untethered micro- and nano-robotics.

The broader topic list gives the fuller picture of what will be presented: learning approaches to registration, segmentation, modelling, sensing and control; novel robotic hardware and sensors for diagnosis and intervention; motion compensation and active guidance; human–robot collaboration and shared control; augmented and mixed reality and novel interfaces; surgical workflow analysis, training and skill assessment; robotic endoscopes and catheters; variable-stiffness systems; microsurgery; teleproctoring and telesurgery; and — importantly for anyone trying to actually ship a device — standardisation, regulation, safety, dependability and usability.

Contributions take the form of two-page extended abstracts, which is the format that makes CRAS what it is: it lowers the barrier to presenting work in progress, so the conference surfaces results a year or two before they appear as journal papers. Authors of accepted abstracts on the magnetics theme are invited to submit full manuscripts to a special issue of Magnetic Medicine, with peer review and no article processing charges; authors on the perception, autonomy and soft-robotics themes are invited to a further special issue. For a doctoral researcher, that is a clean path from a two-page abstract to a journal publication.

The format, judging by the 2025 edition in Lisbon, is a single-track, three-day meeting: paired paper sessions grouped by theme (medical image processing, control, user interfaces and virtual and augmented reality, sensors, AI-based diagnosis and detection, novel hardware, medical signal processing, autonomy), a poster pitch session and invited keynotes. The 2025 edition ran five keynotes, from Arianna Menciassi (Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna), Ferdinando Rodriguez y Baena (Imperial College London), Jaydev Prataprai Desai (Georgia Tech), Marco A. Zenati (Harvard) and Olivier Da Costa — a fair indication of the level. The 2026 keynote line-up has not yet been published; the draft programme shows unnamed keynote slots.

Registration is £400 for the regular early-bird rate (on or before 17 July) and £600 standard thereafter; students pay £200 early-bird and £300 standard. The fee is VAT exempt and includes access to all sessions, the abstract booklet, daily refreshments and lunches, the poster session, a drinks reception on Wednesday 16 September and the conference dinner on Thursday 17 September at The Queens Hotel in the city centre. Delegates arrange their own accommodation; The Queens offers a discount to CRAS attendees booking direct, and there are several chain hotels within a 15–30 minute walk. International delegates should check whether they need a UK Electronic Travel Authorisation well before travelling.

This is a conference for the people who build surgical robots — roboticists, control engineers, medical imaging researchers, clinical academics and the medtech companies that hire them. It is small enough that you will meet everyone working on your problem, and specific enough that they will understand it.