One of the treatment approaches for early-stage breast cancer is breast-conserving surgery (BCS), sometimes referred to as lumpectomy. In these procedures, the surgeon removes the tumor from the breast and a small portion of the surrounding healthy tissue to prevent disease relapse. One of the most significant challenges in these procedures is achieving total tumor resection because it is difficult to determine tumor boundaries intraoperatively. As a result, over 30% of BCS procedures result in incomplete resection and therefore residual cancer tissue is left behind on the tumor bed. One of our graduate research projects is to address this issue with robotics. We hypothesize that cooperative robotics can be used to guide the surgeon during the initial resection, and a robotic tissue sensing system can be deployed afterwards to identify and localize residual cancer on the tumor bed. Beyond breast cancer surgery, there are other soft tissue surgeries that present challenges and may benefit from image-guided robotics. Therefore, we also hypothesize that the technology and tools necessary to test and validate our robot-assisted breast cancer research can be applied to other clinical areas. With this, we intend to work with and contribute to open-source software platforms to promote technology transfer and enable rapid prototyping for other image-guided, robotic procedures.