In this talk, Professor Fumiya Iida will introduce some of the research projects in his laboratory in Cambridge that make use of soft robotics and machine learning techniques, for addressing the complex problems in robotic applications such as those in agriculture.
Soft robotics research has made considerable progress in many areas of robotics technologies based on deformable functional materials, including locomotion, manipulation, and other morphological adaptation such as self-healing, self-morphing, and mechanical growth. While these technologies open up many new robotics applications, they also introduce a number of challenging problems in terms of sensing, modelling, planning and control. Because of the general complexity of the system based on flexible and continuum mechanics and a wide range of system-environment interactions, the conventional methods are often not applicable, and new approaches are necessary based on state-of-the-art machine learning techniques.
Fumiya Iida is a Professor of Robotics at the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, the director of Bio-Inspired Robotics, and the deputy director of the EPSRC Centre of Doctoral Training in Agri-Food Robotics. He has a master's degree in Mechanical Engineering from Tokyo University of Science and a doctorate in Informatics from the University of Zurich. His research interests include biologically inspired robotics, embodied artificial intelligence, and biomechanics, where he's been involved in a number of research projects related to dynamic legged locomotion, dextrous and adaptive manipulation, human-machine interactions, and evolutionary robotics.
