Robotic Instruments

The Robotic Instruments Group conducts research in physical and system-level robotics, creating new robotic capabilities through the integration of physical interaction principles, experimental platforms, and sensing, control, and learning methods. We develop robotic instruments and systems that sense, actuate, manipulate, and interact with objects and environments by harnessing diverse physical mechanisms, including contact, acoustic fields, magnetic fields, interfacial forces, and fluidic flows.

Expanding the robotic action space

Our work addresses a broader question: what new physical capabilities can robotic systems gain across scales and environments? This is a central question for robotics: while intelligence can guide action, physical and system-level robotics determines how robots can act and interact with the physical world. A key frontier is therefore to expand the robotic action space: creating interactions, instruments, and platforms that make previously impossible tasks achievable and open new technological paths.

We are particularly interested in regimes where conventional assumptions of robotic manipulation begin to break down, for example because of scale, softness, fragility, low mass, interaction distance, limited accessibility, or the nature of the surrounding environment. By working in these regimes, we seek to develop new physical capabilities that enable robots to interact with matter in ways that conventional approaches cannot. This includes interaction with biological samples, fibers, droplets, and particles, as well as membranes and other deformable or shape-changing objects, in air, liquids, and interfacial environments. Such capabilities allow robotic systems to manipulate objects that are too small, soft, fragile, flexible, easily disturbed, distant, or inaccessible for conventional tools and human-scale manipulation.

Robotic technologies and applications

Building on this system-level approach, we develop dexterous, non-contact, and field-mediated robotic interaction technologies. These technologies open new possibilities for applications in biomedicine, materials science, semiconductor and optoelectronic device integration, and industrial systems. Representative outcomes include biomimetic tools for robotic threading and testing of silk and gel fibers, scientific instruments for analyzing surface wetting and protein viscosity, surface-tension-assisted microassembly for semiconductor integration, methods for targeted drug delivery in cancer research, and intelligent instruments for wound treatment, as well as novel robotic capabilities such as airflow-mediated remote manipulation of objects and high-speed micromanipulation platforms.

Leader of the research group: Prof. Quan Zhou