Special Issue on Embodied Medical Robotics: From Mechanical Intelligence to Multimodal Cognitive Autonomy
Published 11 May, 2026
Recent progress in foundation models, soft materials, and miniaturized sensing has opened new directions for medical robotics, expanding the scope of medical robotic systems from conventional teleoperated tools toward more intelligent platforms with improved capabilities in perception, interaction, and decision-making. Against this background, this special issue focuses on embodied medical robotics and presents recent developments across three closely connected technical layers.
At the actuator layer, the special issue highlights novel mechanisms, smart materials, soft actuators, bioinspired structures, and continuum robots that support safe and dexterous interaction with fragile biological tissues. At the perception layer, it features advances in sensor design, multimodal sensing, and sensor integration, including force, tactile, proximity, and imaging modalities, to improve real-time awareness of the operative environment. At the decision layer, the special issue covers recent works on multimodal information fusion, semantic scene understanding, agentic reasoning, and vision-language-action models for context-aware assistance and autonomous operation.
By bringing together contributions across these three layers, the issue provides a comprehensive overview of current research in embodied medical robotics and promotes further progress toward clinically relevant robotic systems with stronger adaptability, precision, and autonomy.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Soft and bioinspired actuators for minimally invasive surgical robots
- Medical robots with embodied mechanical intelligence
- Novel tactile and force sensor design and integration for tissue interaction
- Multimodal sensory fusion for intraoperative scene perception, reconstruction, and precise manipulation
- Vision-language-action models for autonomous surgical task execution
- Foundation models and agentic systems applied to medical robotic decision-making
- Semantic understanding and context-aware planning in unstructured surgical environments
- Sim-to-real transfer and digital twins for embodied surgical skill learning
- Human-robot collaborative frameworks with shared autonomy in clinical settings
Guest Editors:
Hongliang Ren
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
Email: hlren@ee.cuhk.edu.hk(Executive Guest Editor)
Professor Hongliang Ren received his Ph.D. in Electronic Engineering (Specialized in Biomedical Engineering) from The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in 2008. He has been navigating his academic journey through Chinese University of Hong Kong, UC Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University, Children's Hospital Boston, Harvard Medical School, Children's National Medical Center, United States, and National University of Singapore. He has served as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), IEEE Transactions on Automation Science & Engineering (T-ASE), IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine (RA-M), and Medical & Biological Engineering & Computing (MBEC). He has served as an active organizer and contributor on the committees of numerous robotics conferences, including a variety of roles in the flagship IEEE Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), IEEE Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), as well as other domain conferences such as MICCAI/ROBIO/BIOROB/ICIA/CVPR. He served as publicity chair for ICRA 2017, concurrently as Organizing Chair for ICRA 2017 workshop on Surgical Robots, and video chair for ICRA 2021. He has delivered numerous invited keynotes/talks at flagship conferences/workshops at ICRA/IROS/ROBIO/MICCAI/CVPR/ICIA. He is the recipient of IFMBE/IAMBE Early Career Award 2018, Interstellar Early Career Investigator Award 2018, Health Longevity Catalyst Award (2022 by NAM & RGC), NUS Engineering Young Researcher Award (2019), Interstellar Early Career Investigator Award (2018), ICBHI (Biomedical and Health Informatics) Young Investigator Award (2019), NUS Young Investigator Award (2013), EMedic Global Gold Medal (2017) and Silver Medal (2021), Best Paper Awards in IEEE-ROBIO (2019 & 2013), IEEE-RCAR2016, IEEE-CCECE2015, IEEE-Cyber2014 among 30+ others awards. He frequently served as an expert reviewer/judge for international funding agencies (60+ proposal reviews) of 10+ countries/regions (including Switzerland, Belgium, UK, Kazakhstan, Poland, Hong Kong, Macau, Chilean, China, Singapore etc.) and manuscript peer-reviews 317+ times for journals, including Science Robotics, Nature Biomedical Engineering, Nature Communications among many other top-tier journals.
Sishen Yuan
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
Email: sishenyuan@cuhk.edu.hk
Dr. Sishen Yuan is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Electronic Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). He earned his bachelor's degree in Mechanical Design, Manufacturing and Automation in 2018 and his master's degree in Mechatronics Engineering in 2021 from the Harbin Institute of Technology, before completing his Ph.D. in Electronic Engineering at CUHK in 2025. His research primarily focuses on micro-semantics-driven embodied theranostic robots for natural orifices, utilizing optical, magnetic, and mechanical principles to achieve precise surgical operations and microscopic imaging in narrow, tortuous, and dynamic lumens. He has published 38 academic papers, with representative works appearing in top-tier journals such as Nature Communications, Science Advances and Nature Reviews Bioengineering. He is the awardee of the Technical Challenge Award at EMEDIC GLOBAL 2021, the Silver Award in the "Challenge Cup", and the Best Design Award at the MRC Symposium 2025. He served as the Session Chair of ICRA 2021 and ROBIO 2019, and serves as a regular reviewer for top-tier journals and conferences such as Nature Communications, T-PAMI, T-Ro, T-II, T-MECH, Scientific Reports, ICRA, and IROS. Beyond his academic research, he has previously gained industry experience at Huawei's 2012 Watt Lab, and serves as a technical review expert for Qianhai Science and Technology Innovation Group Co., Ltd.
Long Bai
Alibaba DAMO Academy, Hangzhou, China
Email: bailong.bai@alibaba-inc.com
Dr. Long Bai is currently a Senior Research Scientist (Algorithm Expert) at the Alibaba DAMO Academy. He received his Ph.D. degree in Electronic Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in 2025, advised by Prof. Hongliang Ren and Prof. Jiewen Lai. During his Ph.D., he was also a visiting student at Technical University of Munich (TUM), advised by Prof. Nassir Navab; and at The University of Sydney (USYD), advised by Prof. Luping Zhou. His research focuses on artificial intelligence and its applications in medical image computing, human-robot interaction, and surgical data science. He is the awardee of the MICCAI Young Scientist Award (2025), APAB Yamaguchi Medal (2025), Ant Group Intech-Future Award (2025), MICCAI Best Paper Runner Up (2024), IPCAI Best Paper Award Shortlist (2024), ICBIR Best Student Paper Award (2023), CUHK Vice-Chancellor's Ph.D. Scholarship Scheme (2021), and numerous best poster and travel awards. He serves as the Program Co-Chair of ICBIR 2026, Associate Editor of IROS 2025 & ROBIO 2024, and Session Chair of ICBIR 2025 & ICIA 2025. He also actively organizes several academic workshops, including MICCAI-EMA (2025-2026), MICCAI-MWM 2026, and IROS-C4SR+ 2025.
Tangyou Liu
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
Email: tangyouliu@cuhk.edu.hk
Dr. Tangyou Liu is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Electronic Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of New South Wales, Australia. His research focuses on surgical robotics, including multimodal perception, motion control, and intelligent decision-making, as well as embodied intelligence and artificial intelligence for robotic systems. Dr. Liu has authored more than 20 publications, including first-author papers in leading journals and conferences such as Nature Reviews Bioengineering (NRB), IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics (T-MECH), and IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). He has received several awards, including the Best Poster Award at the ICRA 2023 Workshop on Intelligent Perception, the Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE/ASME International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics (AIM) 2025, the Champion Award in the KUKA China R&D Innovation Challenge 2021, and the Second Prize in the ICRA RoboMaster AI Challenge 2019. He currently leads a research project funded by the CUHK IdeaBooster program. Dr. Liu also serves as a Junior Editor for Biomimetic Intelligence and Robotics (BIROB) and Industrial Robot (I&R) and is a reviewer for several prestigious journals including Nature Communications and IEEE Transactions on Robotics.
Yutong Ban
Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China
Email: yban@sjtu.edu.cn
Professor Yutong Ban is an Assistant Professor at the Global College, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He received his Ph.D. from Inria (France) and completed postdoctoral training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Medical School. His research focuses on perception and decision-making for intelligent robots in complex surgical environments. He has published widely in top journals and conferences, such as IEEE TPAMI and IEEE TMI. He has received multiple honors, including finalist for the IROS 2017 Novel Technology Award and the EAES 2022 Gerhard Buess "Amazing Technologies" Award. He serves on the program committee of ACM Multimedia and as an Associate Editor for IEEE ICRA and IEEE/RAS IROS.
Mobarak I. Hoque
The University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom
Email: mobarak.hoque@manchester.ac.uk
Dr. Mobarak I. Hoque is an Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer) in Multimodal Agentic AI for Healthcare, at the Division of Informatics, Imaging and Data Science, University of Manchester. He is also currently appointed as an honorary senior research fellow at University College London. He holds a PhD in AI from the National University of Singapore and was a postdoctoral researcher at the Hawkes Institute at UCL, and the BioMedIA group at Imperial College London. Before his academic career, he gained extensive industry experience in real-world translation of machine learning and computer vision research as a Senior Software Engineer at Samsung R&D Institute. His pioneering work on multimodal medical imaging AI has been widely recognized by leading international groups across academia and industry. His research focuses on developing safe, trustworthy, and adaptive multimodal large vision-language models and AI agents for medical imaging and surgical intelligence. He has published over 100 papers in top-tier peer-reviewed journals and conferences in medical imaging AI and multimodal LLM. He serves as Area Chair and Session Chair for MICCAI (2022–2025), IPCAI (2024–2026), and AAAI 2026, and organizing several international workshops, including MICCAI-UNSURE 2025, MICCAI-DART (2022–2023), and IROS-C4SR+ 2025. He also serves on the Editorial Board of Nature Scientific Reports.
Tentative Schedule:
Open for Submission: May 15, 2026
Submission Deadline: November 30, 2026
Notification of Acceptance: January 31, 2027
Publication: February 28, 2027
Submission Guidelines:
You are invited to submit your manuscript at any time before the submission deadline. Please refer to the Guide for Authors to prepare your manuscript, and select the article type of "VSI: Embodied Medical Robotics" when submitting your manuscript at Editorial Manager®. Both the Guide for Authors and the submission portal could be found on the Journal Homepage here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/biomimetic-intelligence-and-robotics
BIRob is an open-source journal with free access and free publication. All the submissions deemed suitable to be sent for peer review will be reviewed by at least two independent reviewers. Upon its editorial acceptance, your article will go into production immediately. It will be published in the latest regular issue, while be presented on the specific Special Issue webpage simultaneously.
If you have any questions, please contact the Editorial Office of BIRob: bir@sdu.edu.cn
