Dr Elena Garcia is PhD in Robotics Engineering, Tenured Scientist at the Centre for Automation and Robotics (CSIC-UPM) and co-founder of Marsi Bionics. Her stay at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology marked her path towards dynamically stable walking robots and elastic actuation systems. As a Senior Scientist at CAR, Elena leads her own research group, transfering her interest in biomimicry in robotics, creating artificial legs and quadrupeds inspired by biology and developing artificial muscles to get versatile movements. Her research activity advances towards bionics, initiating studies on force augmentation exoskeletons with an industrial application. The area of application of her research takes a turn when she receives the visit of Daniela's parents, a 6-year-old girl with a tetraplegia. After understanding the vital need of walking and the absence of devices that can assist children who have lost this capacity, Elena applies all her research to the development of exoskeletons for human gait assistance, and especially to the therapy of neurological diseases in childhood. After just 3 years of research, in which all the previous knowledge in robot locomotion and biomimetics is applied, Elena and her team get Daniela walking for the first time in the lab with the ATLAS exoskeleton. What seemed like the end of a research project became the beginning of Elena’s professional-life project and the hope of millions of families: Allowing all the children in the world to walk, regardless of their pathology.
In this journey, Elena and her team have received more than 30 awards, although for Elena, the best of the prizes is the smile of a child staring at his feet while walking. |
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