ABSTRACT

What happens when we use magnetism to propel simple robots inside the body? Aaron Becker will present a robotics-and-control approach to minimally invasive intervention using small, untethered devices driven by externally applied magnetic fields. The core idea is to push power and sensing off-board—so the robots can remain simple—while still enabling precise tracking and steering in vivo. A key challenge is reliable localization deep inside the body, where line-of-sight sensing fails and measurements are noisy. This talk describes recent progress using machine learning to fuse complementary sensor streams, including ultrasound, to improve robustness. Beyond medical applications such as targeted therapy and chemotherapy delivery, the talk broadens to the lab’s theme of massive uniform manipulation and swarm-scale control, showing how the same actuation and planning principles translate to larger-scale robotic systems and non-medical domains.

BIOGRAPHY

Aaron Becker builds robots that thrive where humans can’t go: inside blood veins, across oilfields, and at the scale of a grain of dust. He is a Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Houston, where he leads a robotics lab exploring control and autonomy for swarms and magnetic micro-robots. An NSF CAREER recipient (2016) and winner of multiple best-paper awards, his group steers micro-scale collectives with magnetic fields, navigates robotic tools using medical MRI systems, deploys drones to eliminate mosquitos, searches for oil, and assembles structures through swarm coordination.

Previously, Becker was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow (2023) in Braunschweig, Germany, studying algorithms for robotic self-assembly. He also served as a Research Fellow (2013) with Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where he developed MRI-powered and MRI-controlled robotic systems. He earned his PhD in Electrical & Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.