This surgeon dreams of helping more people.
She also wants to do it in a better way.
But with a growing and aging world population...
...it becomes even harder to help everyone.
Although surgical tools and hands are already quite precise…
…they are too crude to safely reach the unknown 
and undefined environments deep inside the body.
So how do we enhance the precision of medical procedures
while also making sure its replicable and affordable?
Could technology help us further?
We already use robots for precise tasks, but there is one problem...
The robots that we have right now are too rigid, not flexible enough…
Which makes them unsafe for these kinds of procedures
on fragile, living and moving organic tissue.
For that approach to work, we bring together specialists from biology, 
engineering, design, sensing and control in a close and intense collaboration.
Within the ‘Soft Robotics’ project, we will follow a bio-inspired approach.
We study the functional principles of shape, movement, control and sensing
of soft biological systems...
and reverse-engineer them into mechanical and control concepts.
We will design and build advanced soft robots that can be soft and hard
move and deform flexibly, and sense their environment.
We then test prototypes before making
the new soft robots available for the market.
Only when we’re able to produce affordable
and operational robotics that we can replicate, we scale up.
And only when we scale up will we make a difference in the world...
making possible what our surgeon previously thought impossible:
performing better and more operations than ever before.
And who knows where else our bio-inspired soft robots may come in handy?
