Azad Shademan's Bio Page

Contact: lastname atg ma il d o t c o m

I am a robotics and vision engineer, researcher, and innovator. I'm mostly passionate about building effective and smart surgical robots that improve the outcome of surgery. I work at Intuitive within the Imaging and Intelligence New Product Development team.

Prior to Intuitive, I was the lead engineer of the Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR) - the first in vivo supervised autonomous surgical robot designed for soft tissue surgery. The work was initially done at the Sheikh Zayed Institute for Pediatric Surgical Innovation in Washington, DC and has since been acquired by ActivSurgical in Boston. The STAR robot was featured on the cover of Science Translational Medicine's May 2016 issue as well as on several press releases in 2016.

I obtained a PhD in Computing Science from the University of Alberta. My PhD work was on Uncalibrated Vision-based Control and Motion Planning of Robotic Arms in Unstructured Environments under Professor Martin Jagersand. More info about my PhD research is available in my publications page.

My current research interests are intelligent surgical robots, supervisory control, shared control, and visual servoing in minimally invasive surgical systems.