Mythra V. Balakuntala
Papers
13
Total Citations
121
H-Index
6
About
Mythra V. Balakuntala is a leading researcher in surgical robotics and human-robot interaction, with a focus on enabling safe and effective telesurgery in challenging environments. Her work addresses critical bottlenecks in remote surgery—namely, the high-latency and low-bandwidth communication links that plague austere and rural settings. She introduced the DESERTS and ASAP frameworks, semi-autonomous systems that mitigate the effects of communication delays (as small as 300 ms) to prevent fatal surgical errors, earning over 25 and 17 citations respectively. Balakuntala also developed the DESK dataset (29 citations), a foundational resource for training machine learning models in dexterous surgical skill transfer. Beyond surgery, she has explored robotic ultrasound coaching and occupant-centric air filtration for pandemic response. Her research on one-shot learning and coaching paradigms demonstrates how robots can learn from sparse expert feedback, advancing the field of skill transfer. With over 100 total citations and a growing portfolio of high-impact publications, Balakuntala is shaping the future of semi-autonomous robotic systems for medicine and beyond.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1
- 2DESERTS: DElay-tolerant SEmi-autonomous Robot Teleoperation for Surgery25 citations · 2021
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- 4SARTRES: a semi-autonomous robot teleoperation environment for surgery15 citations · 2020
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- 6Extending Policy from One-Shot Learning through Coaching7 citations · 2019
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