ACTUATOR Conference 2026

ACTUATOR Conference 2026: A successful gathering of the Actuator Community

The International Conference and Exhibition on New Actuator Systems and Applications – Actuator 2026, held from June 30 to July 1 in Wiesbaden, Germany, has concluded successfully.

The Actuator Conference unites the various domains of actuator research and development covering the entire spectrum of actuator technologies and application-oriented topics making this conference a truly unique event worldwide.

International Actuator Community

Since 1988, the Actuator conference series has been attracting researchers, engineers, and industry experts from around the world. In 2026, about 55% of the participants came from academia and 33% from industry. About 60% of the attendees were from Germany due to the tradition of the conference. In addition, the conference attracted participants from all over Europe (about 30%) and from non-European countries, whereby a fraction of 6% was from Japan.

Wide-ranging ACTUATOR Conference Program

The presentations reflected a broad spectrum of research activities which were divided into both technology-related actuator developments—including dielectric, electromagnetic, shape-memory, polymer, and piezoelectric actuators—and application-specific topics such as aerospace, civil engineering, optics/photonics, and medical devices.

In addition, the conference included three special sessions of the priority program KOMMMA of the German science foundation (DFG), which covered the latest results on the development of cooperative multistage multistable microactuator systems. In parallel to the scientific program, the conference hosted an exhibition of well-known companies in the field of actuator materials and devices.

The conference proceedings are published by the association of German engineers VDE. In addition, they will be available on the IEEE Xplore website. This time, the conference organizers also offer the opportunity to submit extended papers for a Special Issue of the journal Actuators MDPI, which will be published in open access format after peer review. Further information is available on the website of Actuators: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/actuators

Thank you all!

We sincerely thank all authors for their submissions and the reviewers for their valuable contributions. Special appreciation goes to the keynote speakers, session chairs, scientific committee, and organizing team for their efforts to make this conference possible. We also gratefully acknowledge the support of our platinum sponsor Ingpuls Dynamics, gold sponsor Wolf Produktionssysteme, silver partners Cedrat Technologies, CeramTec, TDK Electronics and exhibition partners.