Student wins prestigious RSE scholarship

RAS CDT student Derek Chun has been awarded the John Moyes Lessells Travel Scholarship from the Royal Society of Edinburgh to carry out research in Japan with Prof. Koh Hosoda of Hosoda Lab, Osaka University. This is an amazing achievement as the scholarship is open to all branches of engineering in Scotland and Derek has suceeded in making his application stand out from all others.

Derek's PhD research work within the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics provides him with opportunities to travel to international conferences and workshops that are relevant to his research topic, allowing him to meet the authors of the key papers that are shaping his PhD in soft robotics systems and their potential in physical human-robot interaction applications. Derek met Koh Hosoda at a couple of conferences and the conversations started,  resulting in the opportunity to travel to Koh Hosoda’s Lab, which specialises in soft pneumatic humanoid robotics.   

Derek will be based in Osaka for three months and his time there will enable him to further understand the energy interactions between humanoid robotics and the environment. He will provide an energy-based approach to analyse and develop humanoid systems based on his PhD.