Keywords
Biography
Dr Thanh Nho Do is currently a Scientia Senior Lecturer at Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering (GSBmE), University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney. He directs UNSW Medical Robotics Lab. In 2015, he was awarded his PhD degree in Mechanical Engineering (Surgical Robotics) from the School of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering (MAE), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He also received his B. Eng. degree in Manufacturing...view more
Dr Thanh Nho Do is currently a Scientia Senior Lecturer at Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering (GSBmE), University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney. He directs UNSW Medical Robotics Lab. In 2015, he was awarded his PhD degree in Mechanical Engineering (Surgical Robotics) from the School of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering (MAE), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He also received his B. Eng. degree in Manufacturing Engineering with Honor Program from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology, Vietnam. He was a Postdoctoral Scholar at California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI), UC Santa Barbara (UCSB), USA. He also worked as a Research Fellow and a Group Leader at Robotic Research Center, School of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering (MAE), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore.
His main research interests include:
- Flexible surgical devices, especially Natural Orifice Transluminal Endoscopic Surgery (NOTES) systems, for gastrointestinal cancer treatments
- Soft robotics including stretchable sensors and actuators for haptic/tactile displays and their applications to other robotic systems
- Soft assistive device for heart failure and soft artificial organs
- Soft Wearable Haptic Devices
- Functional materials for soft electronics and biomedical applications
- Variable stiffness structures for flexible endoscopic systems, soft robotics and other biomedical applications
- Miniature soft magnetic robots for drug delivery systems
- Soft magnetic capsule endoscopy for obesity treatments and gastrointestinal diagnosis
- Soft pneumatic/hydraulic actuators
- Soft programmable planar fabric actuators
- Advanced wearable systems for haptic/tactile displays and NOTES systems
- Advanced mechatronic systems for the treatment of tracheal diseases and other respiratory disorders
- Nonlinear backlash/hysteresis modeling and identification methods
- Advanced control algorithms (feedforward and nonlinear adaptive control) for flexible medical systems and smart materials and structures
Editorial Activities:
- Editor-Nature Communications Engineering
- Guest Editor-Sensors, Special Issues "Soft Sensors, Actuators and Sensing Technology for Medical Applications"
- Guest Editor-Micromachines, Special Issues "Soft Robotics: Design, Fabrication, Modeling, Control and Applications"
- Topic Editor-Frontiers in Medical Technology-Diagnostic and Therapeutic Devices, Research Topic "Wearable Soft Robotics in Diagnostics and Therapeutics"
Lab Members and Research Activities:
Please visit UNSW Medical Robotics Lab
Dr. Do is currently looking for undergraduate and postgraduate students to join his research group starting 2025. The research projects include
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Project 1: The design, fabrication, modeling, control of novel soft artificial organs using soft robotic technologies (soft sensors and actuators)
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Project 2: The development of flexible surgical surgical robotics for gastrointestinal cancer treatments,
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Project 3: Soft wearable haptic devices for VR/AR and medical applications
- Project 4: Soft wearable assistive device for human augmentation
Prospective students with background in mechanical design, mechatronics, robotics, control systems, and soft materials with good hands-on skills please feel free to contact Dr. Do to discuss desired projects. Please also include CV and transcript together with names and contacts of at least two academic referees.
There are several scholarships available for both domestic and international students. Please follow the below links for deadlines and other information:
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Determine Your Eligibility for a Scholarship: https://selfassessment.research.unsw.edu.au/
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Meet English requirement: https://www.unsw.edu.au/english-requirements-policy
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Key-dates: https://research.unsw.edu.au/key-dates
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UNSW Post Graduate Research Scholarship for International Students,
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UNSW Post Graduate Research Scholarship for Domestic Students
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Australia Awards and Endeavour Scholarships and Fellowships
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UNSW/Home Country Joint Scholarship
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Vietnam-Vingroup Scholarships (for Vietnamese candidates)
My Grants
- 2025: GLOBAL RESEARCH AND IMPACT PROGRAM Grant
- 2024: 3Rs Grant
- 2023: GROW Early Career Academics Grant
- 2023: Faculty of Engineering Goldstar Award Grant
- 2023-2026: ARC Discovery Project
- 2022-2026: UNSW Scientia Grant
- 2022: Google Research Program Project
- 2022: GROW Early Career Academics Grant
- 2021-2026: ARC Research Hub for Connected Sensors for Health
- 2021-2023: Vanguard Grant, Heart Foundation fo Australia
- 2021-2022: 2021 Technology Research Grants, Intuitive Surgical, USA
- 2021: The Frontiers Technology Clinical Academic Group 2020 Grant
- 2021: UNSW minor equipment grant
- 2020: UNSW Research Infrastructure Scheme 2018
- 2020: UNSW Research Infrastructure Scheme 2020
- 2018-2022: UNSW Start-Up Grant
- 2018-2022: UNSW Scientia Grant
- 2018: UNSW minor equipment grant
- 2018-present: (Sole CI or Co-CI) Generous Supports from the Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Egnineering, and University of New South Wales etc.
My Awards
- 2024: UNSW GRIP Award
- 2024: World Top 2% Scientist, Stanford University
- 2024: Best Poster Award, IROS 2024
- 2024: NSW Young Tall Poppy Science Award
- 2024: NSW Cardiovascular Research Network (CVRN) Professional Development Award
- 2024: Top 4 Robots of the Year 2023 by Thomson Reuters
- 2023: 2x Finalist Poster Awards, EMBC 2023
- 2023: Best Poster Award, EMBC 2023
- 2023: Best Poster Award, ICRA 2023
- 2023: Top 100 in Engineering Scientific Reports
- 2023 UNSW Faculty of Engineering Goldstar Award
- 2022 Google Research Scholar Award
- 2022 NSW Cardiovascular Research Network (CVRN) Professional Development Award
- 2021 Arc PGC Outstanding Supervisor Award
- 2020 The Best of Advanced Materials Technologies
My Teaching
Publications
by Dr Thanh Nho Do
ORCID as entered in ROS
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4980-5251
Related Links
Soft robotic left-ventricle simulator perfectly mimics real cardiac motion
A heart simulator that replicates the complicated movements and functions of a real human heart has been created. The human heart is a complex organ, and researchers have been developing artificial models to gain a deeper understanding of its workings. Now, a heart simulator that re...
New electricity-free soft robot could aid precise surgery
Complex endovascular procedures may become easier thanks to a new hydraulic system that can accurately control a small robotic probe. Biomedical engineers have developed a new soft robotic system that works without electricity or motors, allowing for more precise surgeries at lower ...
5 space robots that could heal human bodies—or even grow new ones
What would a space ER look like? Bio-inks, magnetic robots, and fungi-inspired tubes are just some of the futuristic options. IN ONE OF HUMANITY’S many possible futures, the fearless explorers tasked with climbing cloud-splitting mountains in oxygen-poor atmospheres or charting the l...
"75 Years of UNSW Engineering": "Designing the medical robots of the future"
At the UNSW Medical Robotics Lab, researchers are developing medical devices that are designed to enhance the quality of human life. Engineers, neuroscientists and medical doctors work together to create advanced medical devices, wearable haptic devices and soft robotic technologies....
Artificial Muscles Woven Into Smart Textiles Could Make Clothing Hyperfunctional
The UNSW team’s smart textile enables fabric reconfiguration that can produce shape-morphing structures, such as this butterfly and flower, which can move using hydraulics
New shape-shifting material can move like a robot
Engineers have developed a new class of smart textiles that can shape-shift and turn a two-dimensional material into 3D structures. The team from UNSW Sydney’s Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering, and Tyree Foundation Institute of Health Engineering (Tyree iHealthE), led by Dr ...
Bringing artificial muscles to life, using textiles?
Yes. Smart textiles, to be exact, that can mimic and support the movement of the human body. This is the result of biomedical engineers manipulating fabrics to develop artificial muscles and generate robotic ingenuity. This revolutionary technology is promising a range of medical ap...
Robotic Clothes? Check Out These Aussie-Made Smart Textiles
The technology involves soft, artificial ‘muscles’, made of long silicon tubes filled with fluid and manipulated with hydraulics. The artificial muscles are surrounded by a “helical coil of traditional fibres”, with the ability to be programmed, changing how they might contract, expand ...
This soft, snake-like gripper could revolutionise the use of robotics in surgery
A team from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) has created a device that could pave the way for new surgical methods and even the creation of cybernetic humans. Scientia lecturer Dr Thanh Nho Do and his team at the UNSW Medical Robotics Lab took inspiration from nature to create t...
UNSW engineers develop smart sutures to speed up wound recovery
Engineers from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) have pioneered a new kind of suture to help wounds heal faster after surgery. The smart sutures developed by Dr Thanh Nho Do and his team at the UNSW Medical Robotics Lab automatically tighten over a wound without the need for hum...
Using Soft Robotics to Perform Sutures
Wound closure is a technique for speeding up the repair of faulty tissue at a surgical site. Surgery sutures with new soft artificial muscles are beneficial for medical procedures because they help wounds heal quicker by joining tissue and forming microscopic scars, as stated in the jou...
This artificial skin feels ‘ghosts’ — things you wish were there
Long-distance communication may benefit from a robot’s touch. And that may come in the form of a new gadget developed by engineers in Australia. Haptic is a term for things that relate to one’s sense of touch. The new haptic device slips over someone’s finger like the tip of a glove....
“Robotic snake” can grip and pick up objects
Researchers in Australia take inspiration from nature to create a soft-robotic gripper that moves away from the conventional hand-like design. oft robots is a burgeoning field combining electrical engineering and materials science to create robots that can move without the traditional ...
New ‘robotic snake’ device grips, picks up objects
An invention similar to an elephant’s trunk has potential benefits for many industries where handling delicate objects is essential, say the UNSW researchers who developed it. Nature has inspired engineers at UNSW Sydney to develop a soft fabric robotic gripper which behaves like an el...
This Tongue-Like Robot Gripper Can Slurp Its Way Into Tight Spaces
n another example of unsettling biomimicry, engineering researchers from the University of New South Wales in Sydney were inspired by an elephant’s trunk and designed what looks more like a robotic tongue that can firmly grasp objects by wrapping around them like a snake. Biomimicry ...
UNSETTLING ROBOT GRIPS LIKE AN ELEPHANT’S TRUNK
A team of scientists built a tentacle-like robot gripper that they say is more sensitive than a conventional claw or hand-shaped machine — because it wraps around and delicately constricts objects like a python or an elephant’s trunk. Modeling an elephant’s complex musculature allows...
See an elephant-inspired robotic gripper pick up a single grape like a pro
Elephants have amazing trunks. They can pick up small sticks and giant logs with dexterity and ease. That same curling design inspired researchers at the University of New South Wales in Sydney to create a robotic gripper that can grasp everything from a syringe to a hammer. "O...
New glove-like device mimics sense of touch
UNSW engineers have invented a soft wearable device which simulates the sense of touch and has wide potential for medical, industrial and entertainment applications. What if you could touch a loved one during a video call – particularly in today’s social distancing era of COVID-19 – or...
Remote touching allowed
IT’S the type of tech perfectly suited to the COVID age. Sydney scientists have developed a new device which recreates the sense of touch in a revolutionary realistic way. The “haptic” technology mimics the experience of touch by stimulating localised areas of the skin in ways ...
Artificial muscles gives haptic feedback gloves a finer sense of touch
Connected gloves that transmit haptic feedback to the user, be it from objects in distant locations or virtual reality environments, could certainly open up some interesting possibilities. Scientists in Australia working in this field have demonstrated a new device they say offers a mor...
Coiling robotic gripper grasps objects like an elephant's trunk
Chameleon tongues, gecko feet and octopus tentacles are just a few of the animal body parts we’ve seen inspire soft robotic grippers, but nature still has plenty to offer researchers in this field. A team in Australia is the latest to tap into the world of biomimicry, demonstrating a ne...
The Softer Side of Robots
Soft robotics allow for safe interactions with humans, which is imperative for healthcare applications and wearable electronic devices. Smart materials—including shape-memory polymers, pneumatic polymers, hydrogels, and electroactive polymers—have all demonstrated utility in various app...
Soft Machines
UCSB researchers develop a fast, low-voltage actuator for soft and wearable robotics In the world of robotics, soft robots are the new kids on the block. The unique capabilities of these automata are to bend, deform, stretch, twist or squeeze in all the ways that conventional rigid rob...
A Self-Inflating Weight Loss Pill You Can Swallow
Researchers in Singapore have developed a self-inflating weight management capsule that could be used to treat obese patients. Today, moderately obese patients and those who are too ill to undergo surgery can opt for the intragastric balloon, an established weight loss intervention that...
Self-Inflating Swallowable Capsule for Weight Management
Researchers from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore have developed a swallowable self-inflating capsule, which enlarges within the stomach under the influence of a hand-held magnet. By filling a portion of the stomach, the balloon induces a sense of fullness, helping obese pa...
Robotic Proboscis Offers Firm but Sensitive Grip
“Why did God give us hands? To grab!” says Alexis Zorba in Zorba the Greek. Roboticist have turned this piece of wisdom on its head—to grab, give them hands—a philosophy that has limited the strength and finesse with which the robots of the world do their grabbing. “Most soft gripper...
Soft Power: The Rise of Bio-Friendly Robots
Soft robotics allow for safe interactions with humans, which is imperative for healthcare applications and wearable electronic devices. Smart materials—including shape-memory polymers, pneumatic polymers, hydrogels, and electroactive polymers—have all demonstrated utility in various app...
Fast, low-voltage actuator for soft and wearable robotics
These devices could be used in haptics or miniature robotic tools for surgical endos-copy or other medical applications. The unique capabilities of soft robots are to bend, deform, stretch, twist, or squeeze in all the ways that conventional rigid robots cannot. Today, it is easy to en...
Developing a new soft robotic heart device to help people with heart failure awaiting a heart transplant
Dr Thanh Nho Do is a Scientia Lecturer at the University of New South Wales. Dr Do received a 2020 Heart Foundation Vanguard Grant to design a soft skin-like robotic device that can help people with heart failure. What are you currently researching? Heart failure is a condition wh...
Robot arm enters body, prints 3D life-saving cells without major surgery
Scientists in Australia have developed a flexible soft robotic arm that 3D-prints cells onto organs, thereby circumventing many of the risks associated with surgery. A beta version of the revolutionary tech was described last month in the journal Advanced Science. “Our flexible 3D bi...Videos
Research is the bedrock for our work at the Heart Foundation. It helps create the future we want to see: an Australia free of heart disease. Thanks to donors, we’re able to fund researcher Dr Thanh Nho Do, as he develops a better treatment option for people living with heart failure. Only a limited number of heart failure patients have access to specialised life-support machines or a left ventricular assist device (LVAD). These machines keep them alive.
Dr Do and his team are working on a soft robotic device to improve how a failing heart pumps blood. Their aim is to make it less bulky and more portable than the LVAD – and more cost-effective. This will make it easier for more people around Australia to access.
This exciting research could give people waiting for a heart transplant more time and help improve their quality of life.
And it’s because of you that ground-breaking research like Dr Do’s is possible. Will you help advance cardiovascular research and give the gift of life today?
Dr Do and his team are working on a soft robotic device to improve how a failing heart pumps blood. Their aim is to make it less bulky and more portable than the LVAD – and more cost-effective. This will make it easier for more people around Australia to access.
This exciting research could give people waiting for a heart transplant more time and help improve their quality of life.
And it’s because of you that ground-breaking research like Dr Do’s is possible. Will you help advance cardiovascular research and give the gift of life today?
SYDNEY, March 28 (Reuters) - A team of biomedical engineers in Australia have developed a small flexible robot that can be used to 3D print biomaterials directly inside the human body, in the hopes of streamlining future medical procedures.
3D bioprinting is a process where natural tissue-like structures are printed using living cells and other natural tissues known as "bio-ink", in order to repair organ or tissue damage or ruptured blood vessels.
The use of living cells in the printing process allows these man-made structures to fuse naturally with the human body and continue to grow.
Currently, biomaterials must be created outside of the body before relying on typically invasive surgery to insert the materials inside the body, which can lead to high blood loss, infections, and other complications.
Team leader Thanh Nho Do said this new device, named F3DB, will eliminate those complications and risks by printing directly inside the body.
"Currently no commercially available technology can perform direct 3D printing inside the human body," Do told Reuters.
F3DB features a three-axis printing head that can bend and twist using hydraulics on the tip of a soft robotic arm. The printing nozzle can print pre-programmed shapes or can be operated manually if more complex or undetermined printing is required.
The smallest prototype has a diameter of approximately 11-13 millimetres (mm), similar to a commercial endoscope, but it could be scaled even smaller in the future.
"Soft robots (are) very good for working with the human body," Do, the director of the University of New South Wales Medical Robotics Lab, said.
"They can offer high flexibility and adaptability. This means they can fit to any area inside the human body."
Do believes that the device is on track for commercialisation in the next five to seven years, pending further clinical trials.
3D bioprinting is a process where natural tissue-like structures are printed using living cells and other natural tissues known as "bio-ink", in order to repair organ or tissue damage or ruptured blood vessels.
The use of living cells in the printing process allows these man-made structures to fuse naturally with the human body and continue to grow.
Currently, biomaterials must be created outside of the body before relying on typically invasive surgery to insert the materials inside the body, which can lead to high blood loss, infections, and other complications.
Team leader Thanh Nho Do said this new device, named F3DB, will eliminate those complications and risks by printing directly inside the body.
"Currently no commercially available technology can perform direct 3D printing inside the human body," Do told Reuters.
F3DB features a three-axis printing head that can bend and twist using hydraulics on the tip of a soft robotic arm. The printing nozzle can print pre-programmed shapes or can be operated manually if more complex or undetermined printing is required.
The smallest prototype has a diameter of approximately 11-13 millimetres (mm), similar to a commercial endoscope, but it could be scaled even smaller in the future.
"Soft robots (are) very good for working with the human body," Do, the director of the University of New South Wales Medical Robotics Lab, said.
"They can offer high flexibility and adaptability. This means they can fit to any area inside the human body."
Do believes that the device is on track for commercialisation in the next five to seven years, pending further clinical trials.
Biomedical engineers in Australia have developed a prototype of a small flexible robot that they say can be used to 3D print biomaterials directly inside the human body. The device called F3DB functions like an endoscopic tool, and may have applications as a way to repair ruptured tissue or blood vessels without the need for more invasive surgeries. The alternative treatment could in turn low risks associated with surgery, including blood loss and infections.
A team of researchers at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia is working on the development of a mini bioprinter to print new tissue directly inside the body. But this innovative 3D printing process is still in its early stages.
Heart Foundation of Australia
'Flexible robot' for 3D printing inside the body (Reuters Video)
Robot prototype 3D prints biomaterials inside human body, lowering surgical risks
Smart Robotic Textile_Thomson Reuters
Soft Wearable Haptic Glove
Soft Helical Robotic Fabric Gripper
Smart textile acts like biological muscle, similar to Spider-Man suit
3D Touch Experience
3D printing inside the body DW Germany