SOFA Week 2026

23^th Nov 2026:   Training session

Two parallel training courses will be proposed to open SOFA Week. On the one hand, an introductory course to SOFA, providing interested participants with a hands-on introduction to the fundamentals of SOFA, the community and the theoretical foundations of simulation. On the other hand, an advanced course on soft-robotics, with theoretical explanations on robotics with soft bodies and a practical part for building your first simulation.

24^th Nov 2026:   International SOFA Symposium (free)

The symposium focuses on research and scientific achievements based on SOFA. This symposium allows international researchers from the SOFA community to present their scientific work, their plugins and propose live demonstrations. It is also the annual meeting where companies using SOFA can demonstrate their latest products. Finally, it is the opportunity to meet the community and create strong collaborations.

25-27^th Nov 2026:   Technical committee (free)

This committee focuses on technical discussions on current and future developments in SOFA. With developers of the community and SOFA Technical Members, the technical roadmap for the next release is jointly designed. It is also a unique opportunity to meet the developer community and code all together.

Day: 23^th November 2026
Location: ESPRIT building, avenue Paul Langevin, Villeneuve-d’Ascq → Find your way
Level: Beginner – Medium (max 8 participants)

Day: 24^th November 2026
Location: ESPRIT building, avenue Paul Langevin, Villeneuve-d’Ascq → Find your way

Call for presentations (Deadline: Nov 6)

All researchers, engineers and students are welcome to present their work on Tuesday. Duration of the presentation will be between 15 and 20 minutes (including questions) depending on the number of selected submissions. Breaks are scheduled after each sessions to foster discussions and connections.

To present your work at the SOFA Symposium, all you need is to mention your interest in presenting your work at the symposium, to share a (non-definitive) title for the pre-program and to write a short abstract (no more than 200 words) upon registration.

Submit your presentation title upon registration before November 6, 2026.

Pre-program

Day: 25-27^th, November 2026
Location: ESPRIT building, avenue Paul Langevin, Villeneuve-d’Ascq → Find your way
Level: All

The week will close with the 22nd SOFA Technical Committee. This technical committee governs and takes all technical decisions for the roadmap towards upcoming releases. This committee is free and open to all. Don’t hesitate to take part and find out how our open-source software project is managed!

This year again, the SOFA consortium has the pleasure to organize the Open-Source SOFA Awards!

All contributions are eligible for application: it can be an open-source plugin, a pull-request on GitHub, a video, a tutorial or documentation pages! Two award categories are open for competition:

The call for the SOFA awards is open until the 6^th of November 2026. Any contribution – as long it is open – will be rewarded at the SOFA Week 2026. Winners will be announced during the Symposium on 24^th November.

Candidates

Cushion: soft-robotics simulation in Grasshopper	Nardin, Anderson	PiecewiseElasticity is an external SOFA plugin for tetrahedral continuum models with a strain-dependent Young’s modulus. It provides TetrahedronFEMForceFieldPWE, a force field derived from SOFA’s TetrahedronFEMForceField. Instead of assigning one constant stiffness to the whole simulation, the component selects Young’s modulus from user-defined strain intervals. This is a practical way to approximate nonlinear or asymmetric stress-strain behavior while retaining a tetrahedral FEM model.
PiecewiseElasticity Plugin	Nardin, Anderson	You describe a soft robot the way you already model in Grasshopper: a deformable body, the pneumatic cavities or tendons that drive it, and a schedule of pressures or pulls over time. Cushion meshes the geometry, writes a runnable SOFA scene, launches the simulation, and brings the results (trajectories, forces, contacts, deformed shapes) back onto the canvas.
Filasofia: a SOFA plugin for lightweight PBR	Poliakov, Vladimir	Filasofia is a SOFA plugin that renders simulation scenes in real time with Google’s Filament physically-based rendering engine. Instead of SOFA’s legacy OpenGL visual pipeline, Filasofia provides a set of SOFA components (visual model, light, camera, skybox) backed by Filament, and a filament GUI backend that opens a window and drives the render loop. Meshes can optionally be smoothed at load time with Pixar’s OpenSubdiv refiner.

Previous winners

Live demos

Research

Consortium staff