His group, called the Physical Intelligence Department, strives to understand the principles of design, locomotion, control, perception, and learning of small-scale mobile robots.

[3] Sitti and his team aim to encode intelligence (e.g., sensing, actuation, control, memory, logic, computation, adaptation, learning and decision-making capabilities) into robots.

As an example, his team designs, manufactures and applies gecko foot-hairs-inspired elastomer microfiber adhesives for controlled gripping, adhesion/friction, and liquid wetting of robot bodies or grippers and wearable soft sensors.

Metin Sitti and his team look at insects, lizards, jellyfish, and many other small-scale organisms and try to understand the animal's locomotion principles and apply that knowledge to create robots at the small scale.

Microrobots, through their miniature size at a sub-millimeter scale (they are less than 1mm in all dimensions), could one day be able to access enclosed spaces such as microcapillaries inside a human body.

Soft milli- and microrobots such as those Metin Sitti and his team are developing hold huge potential and could one day have a radical impact on medicine.

As semi-implantable medical devices that are shape-programmable and built from biocompatible magnetic soft materials, these technologies would remain inside a patient's body for a long time, enabling minimally or non-invasive diagnostic and therapeutic interventions.

What is more, Sitti and his team recently received the Best Paper Award[11] at the prestigious Robotics Science and Systems Conference for their invention of a baby jellyfish-inspired soft millirobot with medical functions.

He is the editor-in-chief of both Progress in Biomedical Engineering and Journal of Micro-Bio Robotics,[16] and an associate editor for both Science Advances and Extreme Mechanics Letters.

His group's research breakthroughs have been featured in the popular press, such as New York Times,[18] Wall Street Journal,[19] Le Monde, The Economist, Der Spiegel, Forbes, Süddeutsche Zeitung,[20] Science, New Scientist[21] Science News,[22] Nature News,[23] MIT Technology Review, IEEE Spectrum Magazine and Stuttgarter Zeitung.