Azad Shademan's Bio Page

I am a robotics engineer, researcher, and entrepreneur with more than two decades of experience in robotics, computer vision, control systems, and medical devices. My work has focused on advancing robotic systems from early research and prototyping through product development and clinical deployment.

I am the founder of Armanix Consulting LLC, where I work on robotics, intelligent systems, physical AI, simulation, and safety-critical control. My current interests include building practical infrastructure that bridges modern AI and perception with real-time robotic systems, with applications spanning healthcare, manufacturing, and other complex physical environments.

Previously, I spent more than a decade at Intuitive, developing technologies for minimally invasive robotic surgery. My work included haptics, interaction controls, teleoperation, and intelligent robotic functions for the da Vinci surgical platform. I served as a lead architect for Haptics and Interaction Controls for the da Vinci 5 system and later as the directly responsible individual and cross-functional technical lead for Intuitive's first supervised-autonomous function, helping take the technology from early development through regulatory clearance and commercial launch in the United States and Europe.

Prior to Intuitive, I was the lead engineer of the Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR), a research platform developed to investigate supervised autonomous robotic surgery on soft tissue. At the Sheikh Zayed Institute for Pediatric Surgical Innovation at Children's National in Washington, DC, our team demonstrated autonomous robotic anastomosis of soft tissue. The work was published in Science Translational Medicine in 2016 and received international scientific and media attention. The STAR technology was subsequently acquired by Activ Surgical.

I received my PhD in Computing Science from the University of Alberta, where I worked with Professor Martin Jägersand. My doctoral research focused on uncalibrated vision-based control and motion planning of robotic manipulators operating in unstructured environments.

My research and engineering interests span robotics, physical AI, autonomous and semi-autonomous systems, haptics, supervisory and shared control, visual servoing, robot perception, teleoperation, and safety-critical real-time control. I am particularly interested in translating advances in robotics and AI into systems that operate reliably and safely in the physical world.

My publications and patents reflect work across both academic research and commercial robotic systems, with an emphasis on technologies that move beyond laboratory demonstrations toward practical deployment.