The Integrator 2025–2026
Read the latest issue of The Integrator, UW ECE’s flagship annual magazine highlighting the Department’s extraordinary faculty and student research, achievements, alumni stories, special events and more from this past year!
Overview
UW’s Robotics and Controls researchers are leaders in the areas of surgical and bio-robotics, haptics, smart cities, and network control systems. They collaborate with and hold secondary appointments in computer science and engineering, bioengineering, and the UW Medical Center, and are active participants in research centers such as the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering.
Topics
Surgical and Bio-Robotics:
Tactile sensing, biomechanics, biomedical modeling and surgical planning.
Faculty: Blake Hannaford, Samuel Burden
Smart Cities:
Cloud-based systems, network of sensors, RFIDs, spectrum development and testing.
Faculty: Lillian Ratliff, Linda Bushnell, Baosen Zhang, Maryam Fazel, Akshay Gadre
Haptics:
Telerobotics, virtual reality, mobile device interface and remote surgery.
Faculty: Blake Hannaford
Network Control Systems:
Communication networks, sensors, command controllers, drones, developing-world applications.
Faculty: Radha Poovendran, Linda Bushnell
Latest News
UW ECE graduate student Mingfei Chen receives 2025 Google PhD Fellowship for pioneering AI research
UW ECE doctoral student Mingfei Chen has been awarded a 2025 Google PhD Fellowship in Machine Perception. This award is one of the most competitive honors for doctoral students in artificial intelligence research today.
UW ECE Entrepreneurial Fellows Program helps turn research advances into real-world products
This new program supports transfer of research into commercial products through prototyping, customer discovery, and market analysis. Learn how UW ECE-EFP fellows are translating their ideas into impact.
Fighting fire before it sparks
Voltair, a startup co-founded by UW ECE alums Ronan Nopp (BSECE ’25) and Hayden Gosch (BSECE ’25) is innovating drone technology to prevent wildfires from igniting along rural power lines.
Engineering research matters
Learn about the impact and importance of research at the UW College of Engineering, including work by UW ECE assistant professors Jungwon Choi (left) and Kim Ingraham (right).
Eye-tracking for tailored autonomy
UW ECE undergraduate Kyshawn Warren part of NSF-funded team of researchers using eye-tracking technology to help create autonomous systems that can adjust to individual comfort levels.
Researchers
- Bill Yuchen Lin
- Yiyue Luo
- Kim Ingraham
- Akshay Gadre
- Gang Hua
- Stan Birchfield
- Sep Makhsous
- Baosen Zhang
- Lillian Ratliff
- Georg Seelig
- Eli Shlizerman
- Alex Mamishev
- Matt Reynolds
- Linda Bushnell
- Eric Klavins
- Blake Hannaford
- Maryam Fazel
- Howard Jay Chizeck
- Samuel Burden
Research Labs
- Networking and Emerging Wireless Technologies (NEWT) Lab
- Intelligent Systems Lab
- Data-Driven Dynamical Systems
- Seelig lab for synthetic biology
- BioRobotics Laboratory
Latest Projects
Representative Publications
- Hysteresis Model of Longitudinally Loaded Cable for Cable Driven Robots and Identification of the Parameters
- Unscented Kalman Filter and 3D Vision to Improve Cable Driven Surgical Robot Joint Angle Estimation
- Utilizing Elasticity of Cable Driven Surgical Robot to Estimate Cable Tension and External Force
- Debate on the cost of innovation in healthcare: is it too costly?
- Improving Control Precision and Motion Adaptiveness for Surgical Robot with Recurrent Neural Network