MMAE Seminar - Dr. Hao Su - Bio-inspired Surgical and Soft Assistive Robots for Human Augmentation

Armour College of Engineering's Mechanical, Materials & Aerospace Engineering Department will welcome Dr. Hao Su, a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, on Wednesday, February 22nd, to present his lecture, Bio-inspired Surgical and Soft Assistive Robots for Human Augmentation.

Abstract

In the near future, robots will be ubiquitous and work cooperatively with people. To advance this paradigm, this talk presents two healthcare robotics innovations: MRI-guided robots that augment surgeon manipulability for ultra-minimally invasive surgery and soft exoskeletons that augment human mobility.

The first part of this talk will focus on MRI-compatible surgical robotics. While robotics has revolutionized the standard of care for certain laparoscopic procedures, its impact has been limited by the soft tissue visualization, the size, and straight-line access requirement of many existing robotic systems. I will present an MRI-compatible piezoelectric actuation approach that enables real-time soft tissue imaging and minimizes the image artifacts inside the MRI scanner. Then I will introduce a bio-inspired tentacle-like continuum robot that provides dexterous tissue manipulations for ultra-minimally invasive surgery and its applications for MRI-guided prostate biopsy and neurosurgery.

Along the continuum of care, the second part of this talk will present control approaches of bio-inspired soft exoskeletons for human mobility augmentation. Unlike conventional exoskeletons that are rigid and bulky, our soft exoskeletons use soft materials to provide a conformal and unobtrusive means to interface to the human body. The talk describes force control approaches that deliver biologically inspired assistance and how they are able to tackle the grand challenges for exoskeletons, to decrease the metabolic cost of human walking.

Finally, I will discuss my future research plans, addressing the key scientific and technology innovations towards the development of human-safe collaborative robots that are soft, cognitive and cost-effective.

Biography

Hao Su, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. Prior to this role, he was a Research Scientist at Philips Research North America where he designed robots for lung and cardiac surgery. He obtained the Ph.D. degree on Surgical Robotics from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Dr. Su received the Best Medical Robotics Paper Runner-up Award in the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). He also received the Advanced Simulation & Training Award from the Link Foundation and Dr. Richard Schlesinger Award from the American Society for Quality. He holds patents on surgical robotics and socially assistive robots.

Dr. Su is a Junior Chair of the Technical Committee on Mechanisms and Design of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS). He is the Associate Editor of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation and the BioRobotics theme editor of the Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC).