How Nana Obayashi Is Rethinking Robot Intelligence from the Body Up

Nana Obayashi has been interested in flying for as long as she can remember. Her mother worked as a flight attendant, and her favorite toys were all airplane-related. She also loved the films made by Tokyo-based Studio Ghibli, such as Porco Rosso and The Wind Rises, which included themes of flight. The director, Hayao Miyazaki, conveyed in the latter film, “Airplanes are beautiful dreams, and engineers turn dreams into reality,” a sentiment that resonated deeply with Obayashi. “Robotics is similar,” she says. “Our field has the power to take people’s dreams and ideas and bring them into the real world.

It was no surprise that Obayashi, is an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at NYU Tandon, sought to turn that love into her career. She studied aerospace engineering at Georgia Tech, worked at Honda Aircraft and Volvo, and arrived at EPFL in Switzerland for her Ph.D. for reasons that had less to do with research direction than personal geography.

"Honestly, it was luck," she says. "I applied exclusively in Switzerland because I loved the nature there, not because of soft robotics." But once she read her Ph.D. advisor's work, the field immediately made sense to her, not as a departure from her background, but as an extension of it. "My background was in fluid dynamics, so translating that into fluid-structure interaction for compliant bodies felt like a natural fit."

The shift from rigid aerospace structures to soft, flexible robots turned out to be less of a pivot than it looked from the outside. The underlying physics were familiar. What changed was the design philosophy: instead of building stiff systems that resist the environment, she began building systems that move with it.

The Body Is the Brain

The central idea animating Obayashi's work is what researchers call embodied intelligence, the principle that a robot's shape and material are not just housing for its algorithms, but are themselves part of how it processes and responds to the world.

The dead fish and the helicopter seed are her favorite illustrations of this idea in practice. Both objects produce complex, purposeful behavior with no computation whatsoever. The work is done entirely by geometry interacting with fluid forces. "These have no motor, no brain, just geometry doing the work," she says.

The insight extends further that underwater or aerial systems. Her dog, Savoia, offered an unexpectedly clear demonstration of the principle after mouth surgery. Faced with a new oral structure, Savoia didn't give up on his favorite treats. He adapted his eating technique to match his new anatomy, reconfiguring behavior in response to a changed body, without instruction.

"Even my dog, Savoia, taught me about design," she says. "After he had mouth surgery, he adapted his technique to eat his favorite treats with his new 'mouth morphology.'" It's a small example, but it captures something important: adaptation emerges from the relationship between a body and its environment, not just from the computation happening inside.

Lessons from the Ocean and the Sky

When it comes to biological models, Obayashi returns most often to the sea. Sharks move through water with an efficiency that no engineered system has fully matched, an elegance that comes from the precise relationship between their body shape, their skin's texture, and the fluid dynamics of the ocean around them.

"I love sea creatures like sharks, which move so elegantly through the water and are a big source of inspiration," she says. The goal isn't to copy these animals directly, but to understand the design principles they embody, and to ask what it would look like to build machines that exploit their environment as fluently as they do.

In 2024, Obayashi was named an Amelia Earhart Fellow, a recognition given annually to women pursuing graduate degrees in aerospace-related fields. She's also a licensed pilot. It would be easy to read these credentials as a contrast to soft, biomimetic robotics research. She sees them differently.

"For me it's the sense of adventure," she says. "Robotics lets people dream, to make things once confined to sci-fi actually real. Mechanical and aerospace engineering is a great field built for that." The aerospace background isn't separate from the soft robotics work, it's the spirit behind it. The same impulse that draws a person to flight draws them to building machines that move through the world in ways that still feel surprising.

The Prema Lab: A New Beginning

The Prema Lab launched at NYU Tandon in January 2026, and Obayashi is precise about what she wants to tackle first: understanding how a soft robot's body and its surrounding fluid environment shape each other in real time. It's a fundamental question, one that sits at the boundary between physics and engineering, and she's deliberate about framing it that way.

"I want to use robotics as a tool for real, fundamental science, not only applied engineering," she says. The Prema Lab's larger ambition is what she calls coadaptation and symbiosis between technology, humans, and nature, a vision of robots that don't impose themselves on their environments, but evolve alongside them.

What does success look like? She doesn't answer with a technical milestone. "I think success would be when my students find their own deep interests through this process, in research, in classrooms, and also outside." The lab is a place to discover what you care about, not just to execute on a predetermined research agenda. For a researcher who found her own direction through curiosity and a love of Swiss mountains, that feels exactly right.