Collaborative Haptics and Robotics in Medicine (CHARM) Lab

Stanford University

How can a robot communicate through touch? Allison Okamura’s CHARM Lab designs the devices, models, and control methods that make physical interaction useful in robotics and medicine. Its projects connect wearable haptic garments, surgical teleoperation, soft robots, and training environments. Haptiknit explores knitted structures with distributed stiffness for wearable feedback; loop-closure grasping investigates how a robot can hold objects strongly and gently. Researchers combine mechanical design, fabrication, control, and studies of human interaction to understand both what a device does and how a person experiences it.