Ingenuity Labs Presents: Dr. Jessica Burgner-Kahrs

Join us for this talk by Dr. Jessica Burgner-Kahrs from the University of Toronto.

Physical and Computational Intelligence in Continuum Robotics

Continuum robots, with their slender, compliant bodies and intrinsic dexterity, offer unique capabilities for navigating and operating in constrained, cluttered, and deformable environments. Their ability to bend, twist, elongate, and conform enables curvilinear motion and environmental interaction in ways that rigid-link robots cannot replicate. These characteristics make them ideal for tasks ranging from minimally invasive surgery to inspection and repair of complex industrial systems, including turbomachinery found in power generation and propulsion, such as water turbines in hydroelectric plants. Yet, these capabilities come with substantial challenges: the need for novel actuation schemes, efficient and accurate models of their nonlinear behaviour, and robust state estimation under severe sensing limitations. In this talk, I will present our recent advances in the design and control of tendon-driven and soft continuum robots. I will discuss how physical intelligence—the purposeful embodiment of functionality in morphology and material—enables new robot designs that offload computational complexity to the body. In parallel, I will present how computational intelligence, through model-based estimation and control, complements embodiment by extracting and leveraging structure from sparse data and uncertain environments. Together, these approaches enable robust operation and decision-making in real-world settings, advancing continuum robotics toward broader deployment.

Jessica Burgner-Kahrs is Professor with the Departments of Mathematical & Computational Sciences, Computer Science, and Mechanical & Industrial Engineering, the founding Director of the Continuum Robotics Laboratory, and Associate Director of the Robotics Institute at the University of Toronto, Canada. She received her Diplom and Ph.D. in computer science from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany in 2006 and 2010 respectively. Before joining the University of Toronto, she was Associate Professor with Leibniz University Hannover, Germany and a postdoctoral fellow with Vanderbilt University, USA. Her research was recognized with the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize, the Engineering Science Prize, the Lower Saxony Science Award in the category Young Researcher, and she was entitled Young Researcher of the Year 2015 in Germany. She was elected as one of the Top 40 under 40 in the category Science and Society in 2015, 2016, and 2017 by the business magazine Capital and elected one of 100 Young Global Leaders from the World Economic Forum in 2019. Jessica is a Senior member of the IEEE, a Distinguished Lecturer of IEEE RAS, and serves as a senior editor for IEEE RA-L.