Dr. Tania Morimoto

Friday, February 15, 2019
9:30-10:20 am
Bldg. 320, Room 105

This seminar is open to the public. Students in ME 328 and CS/ME 571 are required to attend.

Seminar Topic: Human-in-the-loop Design and Control of Flexible Robots

There are a large number of difficult surgical procedures, particularly for certain patient populations, that involve navigation and access through highly constrained, tortuous anatomy, where the limitations of current robotic systems becomes evident. To address these challenges, we have focused on the development of safer, more dexterous continuum robots and intuitive human-in-the-loop control interfaces. In particular, this talk will focus on our proposed patient- and procedure-specific (i.e. personalized) design paradigm, that leverages the surgeon's expertise to use preoperative medical images to design and fabricate personalized concentric tube robots-- a type of continuum robot constructed from precurved, elastic, nesting tubes. This talk will also include our current work on soft, tip-extending VINE catheters for access deep within the brain, as well as future plans for the creation of new devices and interfaces to improve the standard of care for a large number of patients, whose needs cannot be adequately addressed with existing systems.

Speaker Bio

Tania K. Morimoto is an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at UC San Diego. Her lab currently focuses on the development of flexible and soft robots for unknown, unstructured environments (https://sites.google.com/eng.ucsd.edu/morimotolab/research). She obtained her undergraduate degree at MIT, followed by her masters and PhD degrees at Stanford University, all in Mechanical Engineering. Her research interests include surgical robotics, haptics, and engineering education.