About

UK-RAS Task Group on Soft Robotics

 

Mission

Soft robotics is a recently emerged field of robotics that has grown substantially in the last years. It extends the conventional robot design approach by using a wider range of new, often soft, materials including silicon, smart materials, polymers, hydrogels, and many others. The result is a highly interdisciplinary approach to robotic design with a substantial potential to provide novel robotic solutions for a wide range of sectors, including, agriculture, health, industry, entertainment, and many others. The UK is at the forefront of this new approach and is home to a number of world-leading research groups. To strengthen this position and to enable a maturation of this field this Strategic Task Group aims to achieve the following three goals.

  • To establish an industry advisory club to facilitate a transfer to real-world applications

  • To identify grand challenges, to develop benchmark tests, and to establish a recurrent research competition

  • To widen the research community and attract non-roboticists to the field 

First, the industry advisory club will establish a closer link between academic research and the needs in industry. This will facilitate the identification and development of novel solutions for industrial challenges with the help of soft technologies.
Second, the definition of benchmark tests will help to identify the biggest bottlenecks and establish a focus for the research community. Corresponding competitions will help to introduce younger researchers to the most urgent challenges and will engage them with soft robotics on a deeper level.
Third, the approach of soft robotics, by its nature, is highly interdisciplinary. The field needs expertise from a wide range of research communities including Chemistry, Biology, Material Science, Physics, etc. Moreover, to being able to transform mere technology into useful and accepted machines, we also need to engage with researchers from Ethics, Social Science, Psychology and Art. 

Academic Lead

 

Team

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Helmut Hauser

“Helmut Hauser is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Robotics at the University of Bristol and the Bristol Robotics Laboratory. His research is focused on morphological computation and embodiment, especially in the context of soft robotics. He is interested in understanding the underlaying principles of how complex physical properties of biological systems are exploited to facilitate learning and controlling tasks, and how these principles can be employed to design better robots. He has published over 70 publications at international conferences as well in high-impact journals including Science Robotics, Nature Machine Intelligence and Scientific Reports. Helmut has won various international publication and public outreach awards and led a number of research projects, including the recent Leverhulme Trust Project "Computing with Spiders' Webs".
Helmut is the Director of the EPSRC Centre of Doctoral Training for Robotics and Autonomous Systems. He also leads the UK-RAS Strategic Task Group for Soft Robotics, which promotes Soft Robotics in the UK.“

Martin Garrad

“Martin Garrad is based in the Soft Robotics group at Bristol Robotics laboratory. Martin is interested in developing intelligent soft material robots that are more capable than their rigid cousins. He is particularly interested in making robots that can safely and usefully interact with people, in new approaches to controlling soft material robots, and in new technologies for actuation in soft material systems. Martin has a background in Physics and Computer Science and completed his PhD in Soft Robotics at the Bristol Robotics laboratory in 2019.”

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Emanuele Pulverenti

"As an aspiring spaceman since my early days, every choice I made up until now had the objective of taking me a step further towards outer space. After three years as a cadet in a military school in Italy, I decided to pursue my interest in engineering and study Aerospace Engineering in Bristol, graduating in the summer of 2019 with a Master's degree in Space Systems Design. During a little detour towards renewable energies, I joined Jaguar Land Rover as a Development Engineer working on their new line of full electric vehicles. While working there, I decided to pursue my true passion and joined FARSCOPE with the objective of applying robotics to aid human space exploration.
What pushes me is probably best described in Carl Sagan's words: "For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled. Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven’t forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood"

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Hendrik Eichhorn

“I completed my undergraduate degree in Industrial Engineering at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, with stays at Kyoto University and ETS in Montreal. Since 2020 I am now working towards a PhD in Robotics and Autonomous Systems at the University of Bristol and the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, where I focus on the research of bio-inspired and soft robots for the exploration of extreme environments, including underwater and space. My previous research also includes projects on AI and robotics in agriculture.”

 

Partners

Academic Partner

Industrial Partners and Research Centers