The Kanazawa Institute of Technology at Kanazawa, Japan hosted the 9th IEEE RAS International Conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft 2026), bringing researchers together for a high-energy start and a clear direction for what’s next in the field.
The conference kicked off with a Soft Transition workshop, co-organized by Poramate Manoonpong, focused on soft-robot locomotion and enabling transitions across land and water environments. Building directly on this theme, MAESTRI–SDU doctoral candidate Jawad Mehmood Butt presented an abstract showcasing magnetic actuation for untethered locomotion in magnetic soft robots.
Jawad also delivered an oral and poster presentation for his regular accepted paper on dome-shaped magnetoactive soft-robot locomotion, co-authored with his supervisors, Professor Manoonpong and Xiong, at SDU.
While magnetic soft robots were not yet widely represented throughout the conference, they are expected to be the next major development in soft robotics research.
