Humanoid Robots seem like a distant future especially in a hospital setting, when specialized robots exist to perform tasks like laparoscopic surgery.

However humanoid robots have obvious the offer many advantages to traditional surgical robots. They are the ultimate ubiquitous platform for autonomy. They have the hardware (hands and manipulators) to support nearly all instruments and equipment that medical staff, without requiring specialized robot purchases for narrow sets of tasks. Over time, they will have the ability to accomplish almost any task, without requiring specialized assistance, hardware, or setup.

Our research group is the first group to focus on humanoid robots and their place in hospitals. This research focuses on long-term goals for humanoid autonomy, specifically fundamental research multi-fingered and multi-arm manipulation of instrumentation in a hospital, from ultrasound probes, to equipment user interfaces, to even assisting in surgery.

Research topics involve methods development that comprise reinforcement learning, model-based control, and vision-language models.