Soft Sustainability Robotics

About the Workshop

Natural environments are changing faster than we can observe them. The Great Barrier Reef has suffered six mass bleaching events since 2016, and its reefs and coasts are cared for by Traditional Owners and local communities already living with climate change.

Most environmental robots visit: they arrive, sample, and leave, often disturbing what they measure. Soft robots could hold on with little energy, touch living surfaces gently, and do less harm if never recovered. But should robots stay in ecosystems for weeks or seasons, and under what conditions?

This workshop puts that question to the people who study, manage, and care for the reef, alongside roboticists at every career stage. Queensland’s reefs are our case study, with lessons for forests, lakes, and other living environments.

Our principles

We build on the three principles of Sustainability Robotics (Song, Mazzolai and Kovač, Nature Machine Intelligence, 2026). Robots should be:

1. Minimally invasive: keeping their impact on animals, habitats, and people as low as possible, and measuring it.

2. Universally accessible: affordable, maintainable, and usable by the communities who live alongside them.

3. Symbiotic: delivering real benefits to ecosystems and people, not only technical performance.

Open questions

• Visiting or inhabiting: when is a long-term presence better than periodic visits?

• Body and control: how much of the work can a robot’s body and materials do in place of its computer?

• Metrics: how do we measure a robot’s footprint against the benefit of its task?

• Acceptance and accessibility: what makes a robot acceptable to the communities who live with it?

• Local institutions and governance: who owns the data, who decides where robots go, and how are benefits shared?

What to expect

The programme opens with a local voice. It continues with keynotes from marine scientists, conservationists, and roboticists, then early-career talks and student flash talks. Round tables are open to the audience, live polling shapes the discussion, and speed mentoring connects students with senior researchers. The workshop will produce a shared research agenda and provisional design principles, which we will develop afterwards into a Perspective co-authored with participants. All sessions will be streamed.

Call for contributions and key dates: coming soon.

Date: April 7, 2027     Time: 8.10am-12.30pm

Venue: Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Center