Events Calendar

Speaker: Sheila Russo

Title: Soft Material Robotics and Next-Generation Surgical Robots

Abstract: Minimally invasive surgical (MIS) procedures pose significant challenges for robots, which need to safely navigate through and manipulate delicate anatomy while performing complex tasks to treat tumors in remote areas. Soft robots hold considerable potential in MIS given their compliant nature, inherent safety, and high dexterity. Yet, a significant breakthrough of soft robots in surgery is impeded by current limitations in the design, manufacturing, and integration of soft materials that combine actuation, sensing, and control. Scientific understanding of medical and surgical robotics is entering an exciting new era, where early approaches relying on rigid materials, standard manufacturing, and conventional kinematics are giving way to Soft Material Robotics. Our research at the Material Robotics Lab at Boston University is focused on the design, mechanics, and manufacturing of novel multi-scale and multi-material biomedical robotic systems. This talk will illustrate our work towards achieving safe navigation, distal actuation, integrated sensing, and effective force transmission in MIS by highlighting different classes of soft surgical robots, i.e., soft continuum robots, soft-foldable robots, and soft reactive skins, and novel solutions for soft sensing and soft haptics, with applications in lung cancer, colorectal cancer, and brain cancer surgery.

Bio: Sheila Russo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Division of Materials Science and Engineering at Boston University (BU). She received her Ph.D. degree at the BioRobotics Institute, Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, Italy. She completed her postdoctoral training at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. She is the founder and director of the Material Robotics Laboratory at BU. Her research interests include medical and surgical robotics, soft robotics, origami-inspired mechanisms, sensing and actuation, and meso- and micro-scale manufacturing techniques. She is the recipient of the NIH Trailblazer Award for New and Early-Stage Career Investigators. Her recent research service includes co-chair of the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Soft Robotics and member of the organizing committees of the 2024 IEEE/RAS International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Ubiquitous Robots, and the 2026 IEEE/RAS International Conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft). She is an editorial board member of IOP Science Progress in Biomedical Engineering and also serves as associate editor for the journals IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) and the International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR), and for the peer-reviewed conferences IEEE/RAS International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), IEEE RAS/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), IEEE/RAS International Conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft), and IEEE RAS/EMBS International Conference on Biomedical Robotics and Biomechatronics (BioRob).