Team efforts

Harvard has a small core of less than a dozen robotics specialists who collaborate regularly and rely heavily on one another’s expertise. The focus is on land, sea, and air machines that can work closely with humans, often in medical settings, and which think and behave in ways that reflect the innovative drive of their developers.

“We build the kinds of robots that people haven’t imagined yet,” said Radhika Nagpal, the Fred Kavli Professor of Computer Science. “Little bees that fly, thousands of robots you buy, robots that build by climbing over things, robots that you wear. Our strength in some ways is the wild and crazy robots. Robots that are more like animals than they are wheeled cars.”

One example is the RoboBee. Developed by Wood and controlled by Nagpal’s software, the insect-sized flying robot has wide potential as a surveying tool, with the ability to collect images and data from natural disasters, crop-disease outbreaks, even war zones. Small enough that mechanical levers, gears, and other off-the-shelf components were impractical, the machine demanded advances in areas beyond robotic design.

“With RoboBees, no component was off the shelf,” said Wood. “We had to invent everything from the ground up: new manufacturing methods, new actuation, sensing, computing architecture, new energy storage — then [with] Radhika, new algorithms to control behavior. A lot of the platforms we work on don’t exist and we have to develop them from scratch. We really like those, not just because of the cool factor but because of the tech fallout along the way.”

Sensors and actuators light enough to fly on a robotic insect, for example, might be useful in biomedical devices in which size is crucial, like those used in minimally invasive procedures, said Wood.

“We’re taking all these technologies developed from RoboBees, blending them with soft robotics to make new tools for endoscopy and come up with techniques for procedures that are otherwise quite hard to do,” he said.

A central attraction of medical robotics is the chance to make a positive impact in people’s lives, said Walsh, the John J. Loeb Associate Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences, whose lab-sewn soft-robotic exosuit may one day help stroke patients walk with greater ease. With Harvard Medical School and its 16 affiliated hospitals and research institutions nearby, robotics faculty are well-positioned to determine patient needs that robots might fill, and to collaborate with physicians on setting solutions in motion.

For example, in work backed by the National Institutes of Health, Howe and Pierre Dupont, chief of pediatric cardiac-bioengineering at Harvard-affiliated Boston Children’s Hospital, have collaborated for years on robotic technology for beating-heart surgery. They are currently working on complementary approaches for controlling how robotic catheters compensate for the motion of a beating heart. Success would allow patients to skip open-heart surgery in favor of a minimally invasive procedure.

“It would be so much better for the patient — less trauma, less risk,” said Dupont. “We’re trying to develop technology clinicians haven’t dreamed of yet.”