EPFL hosts RoboSoft 2025

Held at the SwissTech Convention Center, RoboSoft 2025 featured workshops, demonstrations, and keynote talks from experts across EPFL and around the world. School of Engineering professors Josie Hughes, head of the Computational Robot Design & Fabrication Lab (CREATE) co-chaired the event, and Jamie Paik, head of the Reconfigurable Robotics Lab (RRL) served as advisory co-chair.

A focus on interdisciplinarity and creativity

An arts and photography exhibition featured over 35 works ranging from the scientific to the abstract, with subjects including full robots to actuators and other robotic parts, soft materials, and bioinspired and biomimetic devices. The goal of this event was to showcase the soft robotics focus on human-robot interactions, while building diverse connections beyond the robotics community.

The soft robotics competition offered a great way to benchmark robots in more realistic scenarios closer to real world environments.

Meanwhile, 17 teams from around the world took part in a soft robotics competition, which was organized into three categories: in-pipe locomotion, harvesting of delicate fruits, and medical screening and intervention. In a series of timed challenges, the teams had to use their own robots to complete various tasks, including locomotion inside a pipe maze, picking soft 'fruits' (without damaging them), and successfully navigating a camera along an S-shaped curve to simulate a gastrointestinal tract.

“The competition offered a great way to benchmark robots in more realistic scenarios closer to real world environments. We usually include uncertainty within the competition tasks to encourage teams to develop robots that can continue to operate when faced with novel situations, unlike typical lab-based research,” explains competition co-organizer and CREATE Lab researcher Kieran Gilday.

“For me, the highlight is empowering teams to find creative solutions and interesting designs."