Towards Reproducibility in Soft Robotics

Addressing Concerns in Manufacturing, Testing, and Simulation

Half-day Workshop @ IEEE RAS RoboSoft 2026

Kanazawa, Japan

Co-organised with the IEEE Working Group on Reproducibility in Soft Robotics

📍 Venue: Room 412, Bldg. 23 (4F)　(Kanazawa Institute of Technology) Access | 📅 Date: April 11 (Afternoon Session)

Abstract

As soft robotics matures, reproducibility has become critical for comparing results, building trust in reporting, and enabling real-world deployment. Achieving reproducibility remains challenging due to deformable materials, modeling complexity, and diverse requirements across manufacturing, testing, and simulation.

This workshop addresses reproducibility across the complete development pipeline. Expert talks and interactive sessions examine fabrication variability, testing protocols, simulation accuracy, and sim-to-real transfer, with hands-on and audience-driven components.

Topics of Interest

Reproducibility across manufacturing, testing, and simulation
Material characterization and fabrication reporting
Experimental design and evaluation protocols
Simulation and validation of soft robots
Datasets, benchmarks, and data provenance

Invited Speakers

Sukjun Kim

UCSD

Nana Obayashi

NYU

Kait Becker

MIT

Perla Maiolino

Oxford

Andrea Cherubini

École Centrale de Nantes

Manuel Mekkattu

ETH Zürich

Florian T. Pokorny

KTH

Cosimo Della Santina

TU Delft

Tentative Program

Local Time (UTC+9)	Session	Topic
01:45 PM	Introduction
02:00 PM	Interactive Reproducibility Activity	Hands-on
02:40 PM - 03:20 PM	Sukjun Kim	Medical Field
	Nana Obayashi	Field environments
	Kait Becker	Manufacturing
	Perla Maiolino	Sensing
03:20 PM	Coffee Break
03:50 PM	Case Study and Discussion
04:10 PM - 05:30 PM	Andrea Cherubini	Simulation and Experimental Challenges of Vision-based Soft Object Manipulation
	Manuel Mekkattu	Reproducibility Across the Soft Robotics Pipeline: Datasets, Simulators, and Benchmarks
	Florian T. Pokorny	Scalable Real-World Benchmarking for Deformable Object Manipulation
	Cosimo Della Santina	Toy Models for Reproducible Soft Robotics System and Control Research
05:30 PM	Wrap-up & Photo

Organizers

Ricardo Rosales

Ritsumeikan University, Japan

David Howard

CSIRO

Hannibal Paul

Ritsumeikan University, Japan

Laura Blumenschein

Purdue University

Hongying Zhang

National University of Singapore

Zhongkui Wang

Ritsumeikan University, Japan

Ethan DeVries

Purdue University

Additional assistance in organization is being provided by the Co-Chairs of the IEEE RAS Working Group on Reproducibility in Soft Robotics: Woongbae Kim, Robert MacCurdy and Gina Olson.

Contact

Ricardo Rosales - jrosalesfc.ritsumei.ac.jp