Bioinspired Manufacturing of Intelligent Medical Microrobots: From Functional Materials to Autonomous Systems

The convergence of additive manufacturing, biomanufacturing, functional materials, microrobotics, and artificial intelligence (AI) is creating new opportunities for precision medicine, enabling the fabrication of intelligent microsystems for minimally invasive interventions, targeted therapeutic delivery, and operation in complex biological environments. This keynote will present advances in bioinspired manufacturing of medical microrobots and the fabrication, actuation, sensing, and control technologies needed to translate these systems toward practical biomedical applications. The presentation will introduce the design and manufacturing of magnetically actuated microrobots inspired by natural microorganisms. By integrating micro- and additive manufacturing, soft and responsive materials, programmable magnetic components, and modular architectures, these systems achieve controlled locomotion in fluidic, confined, and tissue-like environments. Emphasis will be placed on the relationships among manufacturing processes, material properties, microscale structures, and resulting robotic functions, including bioinspired propulsion, adaptive locomotion, and multifunctional operation. A major challenge is manufacturing microrobotic systems that can not only achieve complex structures and functions but also operate intelligently when optical visualization is limited or unavailable. Approaches combining magnetic sensing, physics-based modeling, and machine learning will be presented for real-time, non-vision-based localization and closed-loop control, connecting advanced manufacturing with autonomous functionality. The talk will also highlight modular and reconfigurable manufacturing strategies that enable microrobotic building blocks to assemble and adapt their morphology, locomotion, and functionality to changing tasks and environments. Inspired by biological organization and collective behaviors, these systems illustrate how manufacturing at small scales can evolve from producing static structures toward creating programmable, adaptive, and multifunctional robotic systems. Advances in additive manufacturing, bioinspired fabrication, functional materials, magnetic actuation, sensing, and AI are transforming medical microrobots into increasingly manufacturable and intelligent systems. The keynote will conclude with perspectives on challenges in manufacturing reproducibility, scalability, biocompatibility, localization, autonomous control, and system integration, and the translational pathways needed to bridge advanced manufacturing and clinically relevant medical microrobotics.

Dr. MinJun Kim is presently the Robert C. Womack Endowed Chair Professor of Engineering at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Southern Methodist University. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Yonsei University in Korea and Texas A&M University, respectively. Dr. Kim completed his Ph.D. degree in Engineering at Brown University, where he held the prestigious Simon Ostrach Fellowship. Following his graduate studies, Dr. Kim was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Rowland Institute in Harvard University. He joined Drexel University in 2006 as Assistant Professor and was later promoted to Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics. Dr. Kim has been exploring biological transport phenomena including cellular/molecular mechanics and engineering in novel nano/microscale architectures to produce new types of nanobiotechology, such as nanopore technology and nano/micro robotics. His notable awards include the National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2008), Drexel Career Development Award (2008), Human Frontier Science Program Young Investigator Award (2009), Army Research Office Young Investigator Award (2010), Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship (2011), KOFST Brain Pool Fellowship (2013 & 2015), Bionic Engineering Outstanding Contribution Award (2013), Louis & Bessie Stein Fellowship (2008 & 2014), ISBE Fellow (2014), ASME Fellow (2014), Top10 Netexplo Award (2016), KSEA & KOFST Engineer of the Year Award (2016), IEEE Senior Member (2017), Gerald J. Ford Research Fellowship (2018), Protégé of the Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas (2019), Brain Pool Fellow of the National Research Foundation of Korea (2023), AIMBE Fellow (2024), Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2024), Senior Member of NAI (2025), and IABS Fellow (2025).