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About

Sontje Ihler is a robotics researcher advancing the frontier of autonomous surgical assistance and medical device design. Her work centers on developing intelligent robotic scrub nurses, with key contributions spanning deep-learning-based instrument detection, novel gripper mechanisms, and bioprinting. Ihler’s most cited paper (14 citations) introduces a deep-learning framework for detecting complete surgical instrument sets during wisdom teeth extraction, a foundational step for intra-operative robotic support. She further improved detection robustness through multi-view voting, addressing real-world error margins. In hardware innovation, Ihler designed HybGrip—a synergistic hybrid gripper combining granular jamming and pinching for reliable grasping of diverse surgical tools (5 citations). Her CrocoGrip, based on compliant mechanisms, achieves near-zero particle generation, making it ideal for clean-room lab automation. Additionally, she contributed to a six-degree-of-freedom extrusion bioprinter for personalized tissue engineering. Ihler’s work demonstrates a rare ability to integrate perception, manipulation, and mechanical design, directly tackling the challenges of translating robotics into clinical and laboratory settings. Her research is shaping the next generation of autonomous, contamination-free, and highly adaptive robotic systems.