Research seminar
Small scale robots have the potential to offer many unique applications for minimally invasive surgery, sensing and drug delivery in healthcare as well as more generally for microfactories and as scientific tools. They are precise end-effectors that can manipulate objects with a high degree of accuracy. Many surgical and on-chip tasks can be performed by manipulating these robots in their dedicated environments. Therefore, these robots are an attractive research area because of their ability to maneuver inside small and constrained environments and perform tasks that were previously considered infeasible. These robots enable us to make surgery minimally invasive as they can remotely navigate their way to a target site through tortuous paths and perform interventional tasks. Because these robots are too small for electronics and on-board power, they are often actuated remotely using magnetic fields as these field can penetrate most environments and are relatively safe for biological organisms. This makes them an ideal tool to use inside the human body and for on-chip applications with cells. Soft continuum robots as well as moving microrobots actuated using magnetic fields will be shown along with the progress these technologies have made towards different medical applications.
Speaker biography
Onaizah Onaizah received her BSc in Physics from the University of Toronto in 2013, her MSc in Medical Biophysics from Western University in 2015 and her PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Toronto in 2019. She is currently a Research Fellow in Surgical Robotics at the University of Leeds working in the STORM Lab under the direction of Dr. Pietro Valdastri, who was the plenary speaker at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in 2021. She is the recipient of the NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2020 and was featured as one of nine women to watch from the University of Toronto Engineering’s class of 2020. Her research interests include small-scale and soft robotics incorporating both fabrication and control strategies.