I had the pleasure of giving Keynote 4 at the COSUR 2026 Summer School on Control of Surgical Robots, held September 14–16, 2026 at the School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University of Leeds, UK — a pre-event of the CRAS 2026 conference.

Group photo of COSUR 2026 speakers and participants on the steps of the University of Leeds
Speakers and participants of COSUR 2026, University of Leeds.

My Keynote

Title: What Does a Surgical Robot Really Need to Know About the Human Body?

The talk started from a simple framing question — not how much anatomy a surgical robot needs, but what physical information it actually needs: geometry, stiffness, deformation, contact, friction, viscoelasticity, patient-specific anatomy, uncertainty, boundary conditions, topology.

Slide from the talk listing the physical properties a surgical robot may need to know about the human body: geometry, stiffness, deformation, contact, friction, viscoelasticity, patient-specific anatomy, uncertainty, boundary conditions, topology
Slide 2 of the talk: the physical properties on the table.

The real question

Not how much anatomy — but what physical information is actually necessary to perform a given task. Does the answer depend on the task?

I used the SOFA framework and our Cosserat plugin to illustrate this, covering the Cosserat rod formulation, constraint-based control, and how these models support the kind of interactive, patient-specific simulation that surgical robotics increasingly relies on.

About COSUR 2026

COSUR is a doctoral-level summer school on robot-assisted surgery, jointly organized by:

  • ARISE and STORM labs at the University of Leeds
  • Altair Robotics Lab, University of Verona
  • Robot-Assisted Surgery research group, KU Leuven
  • Multiple European research projects in medical robotics

The program combines technical tutorials and clinical perspectives spanning control, sensing, imaging, autonomy, and machine learning in surgical robotics. This year’s speaker line-up also included Murilo Marinho (University of Manchester), Chris Fryer (CMR Surgical), Ilana Nisky (Ben-Gurion University), Peter Kazanzides (Johns Hopkins University), and Gerardo Loza (University of Leeds).

Takeaways

Beyond the talk itself, it was a great opportunity to reconnect with the surgical robotics community and meet the next generation of PhD students working across control, AI, and clinical robotics. Always energizing to see how much the field moves between editions of COSUR.

More information: https://cras-eu.org/cosur-2026/