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About

Renjia Tan’s research focuses on the biomechanics and actuation of capsule robots for gastrointestinal (GI) examination, a field where she has made foundational contributions to understanding the complex interactions between robotic devices and soft biological tissues. Her most influential work, "Modeling of Velocity-dependent Frictional Resistance of a Capsule Robot Inside an Intestine" (56 citations), established a critical framework for predicting how intestinal tissue responds to moving robots, directly addressing the poor controllability that plagued early active capsule endoscopes. Tan pioneered the "internal force-static friction" capsubot concept, a novel driving mode that exploits internal mass movement and friction to achieve locomotion without external tethers—a breakthrough detailed in her 2009 design paper (19 citations). She further advanced the field by developing nonlinear viscoelastic interaction models (13 citations) and experimentally characterizing small intestine viscoelasticity (12 citations), providing essential data for robot design. Her work on linear driving mechanisms (5 citations) demonstrated a harmless, controllable actuator validated through both finite element analysis and physical experiments. By systematically modeling tissue resistance and creating new actuation principles, Tan has laid the biomechanical groundwork for next-generation, autonomous GI diagnostic robots.