Welcome to the
Material Robotics Laboratory!

The Material Robotics Lab at BU MechE focuses on design, mechanics, and manufacturing of novel multi-scale and multi-material biomedical robotic systems.
Our research areas include medical and surgical robotics, soft robotics, sensing and actuation, meso- and micro-scale manufacturing techniques, and advanced materials.

We are investigating scalable, advanced manufacturing technologies to develop soft-foldable devices, with high topological complexity and degrees of freedom, able to perform advanced surgical tasks.
We are developing new multi-functional soft material composites and investigating different sensing strategies as well as actuation methodologies to improve the range of capabilities of soft medical robots.
We create hybrid soft-foldable robots incorporating soft materials and rigid structural components, taking inspiration from the principles of origami and kirigami, and embed distributed sensors and actuators directly into the materials of the robot’s body. Our methods combine accuracy, scalability, flexibility in material selection, and monolithic integration of electrical and mechanical components with soft, biocompatible materials and microfluidics from the realm of soft lithography.
Our goal is to develop solutions to improve existing medical procedures and enable new therapeutic capabilities in minimally invasive surgery.

For more information about our work, please see our Instagram and our YouTube channel!