Special Session on
AMAR-2026: Agentic Medical Assisting Robots for Preventive Healthcare

Aim and Scope

AMAR-2026 invites high-quality research contributions addressing the computational, algorithmic, systems, and interaction challenges involved in developing intelligent, agentic medical assisting robots for proactive and preventive healthcare. The special session seeks original papers presenting theoretical advances, system architectures, applied methodologies, experimental evaluations, and translational insights relevant to deploying trustworthy and resource-efficient robotic systems in clinical and home-care environments.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Multimodal sensing and inference for physiological and behavioural assessment
• Voice, facial, and affective analytics under real-world variability
• Embedded and energy-efficient AI for always-on robotic monitoring
• Edge-centric and adaptive computation strategies for healthcare systems
• Physiological signal processing (ECG, PPG, respiration, gait) under noise and sparsity
• Multi-agent coordination and agentic reasoning frameworks for medical autonomy
• Safety, reliability, and verification for healthcare robotics
• Human—robot interaction and explainable autonomy in clinical workflows
• Integration of IoT health sensors with robotic platforms
• System co-design for regulatory-compliant medical cyber-physical systems
• Prototypes, datasets, simulations, and deployment case studies in preventive healthcare robotics

Paper Submission

Potential authors may submit their manuscripts for presentation consideration through ICETCI 2026 submission system electronically at https://edas.info/N34670 , following the conference guidelines. All submissions will go through peer review process. To submit your paper to this special session, you have to choose our special session title on the submission page.

Important Dates

Organizers

Dr. T. S. B. Sudarshan is a leading researcher in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Multicore Computing, currently serving as Professor and Dean (Research), Dayananda Sagar University, Bengaluru, India. His work spans facial expression analysis, DeepFake detection, autonomous navigation, supernumerary robotic limbs, and embedded AI performance. With significant contributions to robot—human interaction, animal re-identification, and learning-rate optimization in neural networks, he combines theoretical depth with real-world deployment. Dr. Sudarshan has advanced robotic exploration, multi-robot mapping, and time-series modeling, influencing both academia and industry. He is widely recognized for building research ecosystems and mentoring innovative, application-driven robotics projects.

Dr. Avinash Gautam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems Engineering at BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus, where he has served since 2017. He obtained his Ph.D. in 2017 in multi-robot systems and his M.E. in Software Systems in 2009, both from BITS Pilani. His research focuses on decentralized multi-robot coordination, including distributed consensus, cooperative exploration, task allocation under communication constraints, and robustness in heterogeneous agent teams. He also works on vision-language navigation, with emphasis on grounding linguistic instructions in visual perception for autonomous navigation in unstructured indoor and outdoor environments.
His recent work examines scalable coordination strategies, approximate geometric reasoning, and learning—planning integration for long-horizon autonomy. He has presented at technical venues such as IJCB 2023, ICCV 2023, IROS 2022, ICFHR 2022, CASE 2021, SMC 2019, and Mobiquitous 2019, and has published in journals including the Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems, Intelligent Service Robotics, and Neural Computing and Applications. Dr. Gautam contributes to the research community through regular reviewing for journals such as JIRS, ISR, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles, IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, and the Transactions of the Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering.

Dr Kiran D. C. is an Associate Professor in the School of Computational and Data Sciences at Vidyashilp University, Bengaluru. He is also the Director for the Centre for Robotics AI and Intelligence System (CRAIS). He is a faculty leader in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics and an active IEEE Member and contributor to the IEEE Robotics & Automation Society (RAS). He leads the university's IEEE Student Chapter and has been instrumental in establishing the Robotics, AI & Intelligent Systems Center—an interdisciplinary hub driving innovation in autonomous systems, healthcare robotics and Al-driven applications.
His research focuses on compiler optimization for multicore and heterogeneous processors, high-performance computing (HPC), green computing, and human-centric robotics. Dr Kiran has pioneered several healthcare-oriented robotic and agentic AI systems. These includes, Multimodal Empathetic Eldercare Assistant Robot. LARA, a Legal Assistant Robotic Assistant robot; ISWAR, an Intelligent Service for Widgets Acquisition Robot; and VURA, a university research assistant robot. Each initiative reflects his commitment to proactive, safe and ethical AI for real-world healthcare deployment. His work combines robotics, sensing, multimodal machine learning and agent-based architectures—contributing significantly to the emerging ecosystem of medical assisting and preventive-health robots.

Dr. N. Mehala is an Associate Professor in the School of Computational and Data Sciences at Vidyashilp University, Bengaluru, with over 20 years of academic and research experience in Information Retrieval, Search Engine Algorithms, Assistive & Autonomous Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning. She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from BITS-Pilani and previously served for a decade as faculty in the Department of Computer Science & Information Systems (CSIS), BITS-Pilani. Her work sits at the intersection of AI- driven perception, intelligent decision systems, and autonomous robotic platforms, making her contributions highly relevant in smart computing, cyber-physical systems, and human- centered intelligent environments. Dr. Mehala leads the IEEE RAS Student Chapter at Vidyashilp University and has played a pivotal role in establishing the University's Robotics, AI & Intelligent Systems Center, fostering interdisciplinary research in autonomous systems, healthcare robotics, and Al-enabled smart applications. She has contributed extensively to applied computing, including ERP system implementations and advisory roles in industry. Her academic leadership extends to teaching advanced computing courses for professional learners at Wipro, Jio, Mindtree, CISCO, and others. Dr. Mehala's portfolio includes leading impactful innovation projects such as MEERA, LARA, ISWAR, and intelligent evaluation and retrieval systems.