Allison Okamura, a professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University whose work in haptics and surgical robotics has influenced teleoperation systems from research labs to commercial operating rooms, received MassRobotics' 2026 Robotics Medal. Ayoung Kim, an associate professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology specializing in underwater and subterranean SLAM systems, won the Rising Star Medal in the same ceremony. The dual announcements position both researchers as reference points in a field where women represent roughly 15 percent of robotics engineering roles across academia and industry, according to 2025 data from the Robotics Industries Association.
MassRobotics launched the medal program in 2018 as part of its Women in Robotics initiative, a structured effort to address gender disparities in hiring, funding, and technical leadership. The organization operates a 15,000-square-foot robotics cluster in Boston's Seaport District, housing more than 60 startups and serving as a testing ground for collaborative robots, autonomous mobile platforms, and manipulation systems. Previous medal recipients include Daniela Rus from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 2024 and Henny Admoni from Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute in 2025. The awards carry no cash prize but provide global visibility through MassRobotics' network of corporate partners including Amazon Robotics, ABB, and Mitsubishi Electric, all of which maintain on-site engineering teams at the Boston facility.
Okamura's research portfolio spans force feedback systems, wearable haptic devices, and minimally invasive surgical tools. Her lab at Stanford developed the Phantom Omni haptic interface, a device now used in training programs for robotic surgery systems including Intuitive Surgical's da Vinci platform. More recently, her team published work on variable stiffness actuators that allow robotic grippers to modulate compliance during contact with soft tissue, a capability relevant to both medical and industrial manipulation tasks. She holds 18 patents related to haptic rendering and teleoperation, and her citation count exceeds 28,000 across Google Scholar as of March 2026. Okamura also chairs Stanford's Collaborative Haptics and Robotics in Medicine lab, where graduate students have spun out two startups focused on rehabilitation robotics and remote surgery interfaces.
Kim's work addresses one of the thorniest problems in mobile robotics: localization and mapping in GPS-denied environments where water, underground tunnels, or electromagnetic interference render traditional sensors ineffective. Her lab at KAIST developed a multi-modal SLAM system that fuses sonar, inertial measurement units, and vision to create real-time 3D maps of underwater structures, work funded by South Korea's Agency for Defense Development and tested on autonomous underwater vehicles operating off the Korean Peninsula. The system demonstrated sub-meter accuracy during six-hour missions at depths exceeding 200 meters, outperforming comparable approaches from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and MIT's Marine Robotics Group. Kim's research has direct applications in pipeline inspection, mine countermeasures, and seafloor surveying, sectors where autonomous navigation remains a core technical bottleneck. She has published 47 peer-reviewed papers since joining KAIST in 2019 and serves on the editorial board of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.
The timing of these awards coincides with broader industry efforts to expand recruitment pipelines for female engineers. Companies including Boston Dynamics, Agility Robotics, and Sarcos Technology have publicly committed to achieving at least 25 percent female representation in technical roles by 2028, up from current levels near 12 percent according to internal diversity reports. MassRobotics itself operates a mentorship program pairing female undergraduates with senior engineers at member companies, and runs quarterly workshops on topics from sensor fusion to venture capital pitch mechanics. The organization's director of innovation programming told local media in January that application rates for the mentorship program increased 40 percent year-over-year, suggesting heightened interest in robotics careers among women studying engineering disciplines. Whether that translates to sustained hiring gains depends heavily on retention practices at robotics firms, where long hours and hardware debugging cycles have historically skewed toward candidates willing to prioritize lab work over work-life balance.
What to Watch: MassRobotics will host an in-person ceremony at its Seaport location on April 18, 2026, where both Okamura and Kim will deliver technical talks on their recent research. Watch for announcements from Stanford's haptics lab regarding commercialization partnerships for its variable-stiffness gripper technology, likely targeting surgical robotics OEMs. Kim's KAIST team is scheduled to publish results from a DARPA-funded subterranean mapping project in the June 2026 issue of IEEE Transactions on Robotics, which could influence autonomy stacks for defense and infrastructure applications.
