DARPA Surgical Competition (DSC) Industry Day

DARPA's Biological Technologies Office announced an Industry Day for the DARPA Surgical Competition on September 22, 2026, with registration closing September 16, 2026, at 4:00 PM Eastern Time. Attendance is not mandatory for competition participation. The event introduces the DSC vision and facilitates teaming arrangements; capacity is limited to 70 in-person attendees at 4075 Wilson Blvd, Suite 201, Arlington, VA 22203, and 1,000 virtual participants. The competition seeks to develop scalable trauma surgical robotics capable of safely assisting with and independently performing trauma surgery while rapidly learning new capabilities across three evaluation phases: Component Gates, Surgical Collaboration, and Surgical Independence. Participants must be 18 years or older and not on the Specially Designated Nations list. Non-U.S. citizens must submit DARPA Form 60 by September 11, 2026, at 6:00 PM; foreign government personnel must submit an Official Visit Request from their Embassy. Interested parties may submit one-slide lightning talk presentations (3 minutes each, landscape PDF only) or one-page teaming profiles by September 18, 2026. Lightning talk slides must include principal investigator name and institution, team composition, relevant experience, institutional assets, applicable technical domains (robotics, pre-hospital trauma care, autonomous devices, algorithm development, surgical end-effectors, teleoperation, perception/sensing), project abstract, and teaming needs. Teaming profiles (two pages maximum, MS Word or PDF) require principal investigator name and institution, team name, project overview, team capabilities with existing partners, teaming needs identifying technical gaps, and contact information. All submissions must contain unclassified, non-proprietary information only.