Monday, October 27, 2025 - 3:00pm
Event Calendar Category
Other LIDS Events
Speaker Name
Tania Morimoto
Affiliation
UCSD
Building and Room number
32-D463
"Enabling advancements in medical care through the design of soft robots and haptic interfaces"
Flexible and soft robots have the potential for significant impact across a range of medical applications. In addition to their benefits in minimally invasive surgical applications, their inherent compliance also make them well-suited for other tasks requiring close human-robot interaction and collaboration. In this talk, I will present several new robot designs across a range of medical applications – from surgery to rehabilitation. First, I will discuss our work on two different continuum robots – soft, growing robots that achieve locomotion by material extending from their tip, and concentric tube robots. I will also discuss new approaches for providing haptic feedback during teleoperation of these robots using soft and flexible interfaces. Finally, I will present our work on the design of soft wearable robots for rehabilitation.
Tania Morimoto is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and in the Department of Surgery at the University of California, San Diego. She received the B.S. degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University, Stanford, CA, all in mechanical engineering. Her research lab focuses on the design and control of soft and flexible robots for increased dexterity and accessibility in uncertain environments. They are also working to address the challenges of designing human-in-the-loop interfaces for controlling these soft continuum robots, including the integration of haptic feedback. She is a recipient of the Hellman Fellowship (2021), the Beckman Young Investigator Award (2022), the NSF CAREER Award (2022), the ASEE Outstanding New Mechanical Engineering Educator Award (2023), a 2024 National Academy of Science (NAS) Kavli Fellow, and the MassRobotics Rising Star in Robotics (2025).
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Sponsors: A big shoutout to our sponsors, which are making this semester’s robotics seminars possible! We are pleased to have three amazing sponsors supporting the MIT Robotics Seminars this semester: Skydio, Symbotic, and Amazon. Skydio (https://www.skydio.com/) is a leader in vision-based autonomous navigation (and more!) for drones. Symbotic (https://www.symbotic.com/) is redesigning the future of warehouse automation with mobile robots (just a few miles from MIT!). Amazon (https://www.amazon.science/research-areas/robotics) is building new kinds of GenAI for robotics as they grow towards 1M deployed warehouse robots.