Tactile intelligence for smart and soft robots

Supervisor: Dr Lorenzo Jamone

Research group(s): Cognitive Science, Robotics Engineering

The sense of touch is fundamental in humans to explore and learn about the own-body and the external world; to develop self-awareness and to successfully interact with the environment. Similarly, robots can use tactile sensing to learn about their bodies and how to interact with humans and objects. Despite the recent advancements of tactile sensing technologies, their deployment in practical application is still quite limited, although the landscape of possible applications is huge: minimal invasive surgery, rehabilitation, telepresence, automation and robotics. By optimizing the design of soft sensors based on a technology we recently proposed (see http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8000399/) this project will look at realizing deployable soft sensors for smart (and maybe soft) robots that can work both in industry and in public spaces, as well as intelligent control algorithms for these robots to learn from the tactile interactions. Join ARQ (Advanced Robotics at Queen Mary, http://www.qmul.ac.uk/robotics/) to work on this exciting topic under my supervision (Dr Lorenzo Jamone, l.jamone@qmul.ac.uk). You need to be good at electronics and programming (C/C++/Python, possibly ROS), but most importantly you need to be highly motivated and ready to work very hard! If you are interested in creating a next generation of smart touchy robots... plese, get in touch!