Competitions

The RoboSoft Competition 2025 offers a unique venue to demonstrate your robot’s capabilities in application focused scenarios. With a mix of new and returning tasks, shaped by the Soft Robotics community, teams will have the opportunity to push the boundaries of harvesting, pipe locomotion, and minimally invasive surgery. Brand new to this years competition, we invite teams to compete head-to-head and showcase repeatability in addition to novelty and exploitation of soft bodies.

Official information

05/10/2024: Version 1 of the rulebook is now available here (RoboSoft Competition 2025_v1.pdf). Stay tuned for implementation details including official CAD files!

Competition Overview

The RoboSoft Competition 2025 invites teams to test the design and control of their robots in challenging scenarios. The competition will showcase novelties of soft robots like resilience, body compliance, delicate contact, and deformability.  

The principal aim of the competition is twofold: first, to challenge state-of-the-art soft robots; second, to demonstrate the performance of soft robots to increase their impact value.  

Teams may comprise any combination of students, faculty, industrial partners, private partners, or government institutions without restricting the number of participants per team. One member of the team must be elected as Team Leader (TL) and will act as contact point for the team.   

The RoboSoft Competition 2025 is made of scenarios which focus on real-world robot applications. Rather than showcasing a range of capabilities, this year competition will focus on three specific challenges: “in-pipe locomotion”, “harvesting of delicate fruits”, and “medical screening and intervention”. In the 2025 edition, we allow autonomous and teleoperated robots. For all scenarios, teams are invited to bring their own robot. However, a standard manipulator (e.g. UR3 or UR5) will be provided, if requested.  

Each scenario is split down into tasks: points are awarded by executing partially or completely each task. The robot that will earn the maximum number of points will be considered the winner of the RoboSoft Competition 2025. Each team participates with one robot, but multiple entries of the same team with different robot designs are allowed. 

Submission Process

To manifest your interest to participate fill the online form: (submission form). The form should be submitted before 17th January 2025; and it will contain a technical description of the robot and a video (max 2 minutes, 10Mega). Videos should be privately uploaded online, and the access should be provided with a link within the online form. The video should demonstrate the skills of the robot at the current state of development, while the technical document can summarize the expected improvements to be shown at the competition.  

The acceptance notification will be on 27th January 2025.  

Participants will be requested to confirm their participation by 17th March 2025.