The SOFA Week is designed to gather the entire SOFA community, to present technological and scientific advances, while fostering the networking within the community. Previous occurrences made it as the most popular even within the community. Check out the previous 2025 edition. To get the most out of the event, join us on-site to attend the conferences and committee meetings, try out the latest demos, and meet the other participants!
23-27th November
Onsite in Lille & possible online access
23th 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.
24th 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.
25-27th 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: 23th November 2026
Location: ESPRIT building, avenue Paul Langevin, Villeneuve-d’Ascq → Find your way
Level: Beginner – Medium (max 8 participants)
Registration costs
- early bird: 500€ excl.tax. (before the 10th October 2025)
- regular fare: 650€ excl. tax.
Introduction course
This training session aims at providing a wide introduction to SOFA and its community while ensuring the mathematical, physical and computer science backgrounds in order to start in the best conditions with SOFA.
| Time (CET) | Training steps |
|---|---|
| 9 am | Overview of SOFA and its community |
| 10 am | Coffee – for a good start! |
| 10:30 am | Examples of applications with SOFA |
| 11 am | User Tutorial (part 1) |
| noon | Lunch |
| 1:30 pm | User Tutorial (part 2) – involving SofaPython3 |
| 3 pm | Coffee break |
| 3:30 pm | Understand physics with SOFA: from the math to the code |
| 5:00 pm | Questions & Closing of the training |
Soft-robotics course
Requiring mastery of the basics introduced in the introduction course, this advanced session allows to understand the theory of soft-robotics and it offers the opportunity to build soft-robotics simulations.
| Time (CET) | Training steps |
|---|---|
| 10 am | Basis on time integration in SOFA |
| 10:30 am | Soft robots: actuators |
| noon | Lunch |
| 1:30 pm | Soft robots: kinematic jacobian |
| 2:30 pm | Soft robots: inverse kinematics |
| 4:00 pm | Questions & Closing of the training |
These trainings are supported by
Day: 24th November 2026
Location: ESPRIT building, avenue Paul Langevin, Villeneuve-d’Ascq → Find your way
Researchers and companies from the SOFA community join the Symposium in order to share ideas, experiences and to present their on-going research or products based on SOFA. Several sessions of presentations will be organized regarding various simulation topics and application fields. Booths will also be made available for technology demonstrations.
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.
Day: 25-27th, 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!
Wed. 25th November 2026
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Thur. 25th – Fri. 27th November 2026
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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:
| Organizers’ Prize – 600€ | Public Prize – 400€ |
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The call for the SOFA awards is open until the 6th 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 24th November.
Previous winners
| Organizers’ Prize | Public Prize |
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