Heriot-Watt University

Small-scale soft robots have great potentials in bioengineering (e.g., biosensing and cell manipulation) and healthcare (e.g., targeted drug delivery and minimally invasive surgery). Given their soft and untethered nature, such robots can negotiate obstacles, generate complicated manoeuvres, and pass through unstructured environment.

Soft e-skins have recently attracted considerable research interest due to their applications in soft robotics, prosthetics, and artificial skins. Remarkable advances in materials science, nanotechnology, and biotechnology have led to the development of various e-skins capable of detecting different external stimuli, such as strain, pressure, temperature, hydration, and biomarkers.

Robotic applications spread to a variety of application domains, from autonomous cars and drones to domestic robots and  personal devices. Each application domain comes with a rich set of requirements such as legal policies, safety and security standards, company values, or simply public perception. They must be realised as verifiable properties of software and hardware. Consider the following policy: a self-driving car must never break the highway code.

Safety critical robotic and autonomous systems, such as Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs) that operate beyond visual line of sight, require the highest level of certification. Certifiers are concerned with how such systems behave within their environment – as defined by system wide requirements, e.g. compliance with the rules-of-the-air (i.e. SERA).   In contrast, software developer’s focus on specifications - how the system software should behave based upon operational modes and input signals. Many catastrophic system failures, e.g.

Optical cameras have been very successfully used for 3D vision and robotic navigation in texture rich environments and good visibility conditions. However, they have strong limitations in more complex scenarios where the environment is either very dynamic or visibility is poor. In this thesis, you will explore new sensor modalities and how they can help solve these problems.

Lidar point clouds have been widely used to segment large 3D scenes such as urban areas and vegetated regions (forests, crops, …), and to build elevation profiles. However, efficient point cloud analysis in the presence of complex scenes and partially transparent objects (e.g, forest canopy) is still an unsolved challenge.

Soft actuator materials are being actively pursued owing to their importance in soft robotics, artificial muscles, biomimetic devices, and beyond. Electrically-, chemically-, and light-activated actuators are mostly explored soft actuators. Recently, significant efforts have been made to reduce the driving voltage and temperature of thermoresponsive actuators, develop chemical actuators that can function in air, and enhance the energy efficiency of light-responsive actuators.

Wearable sensor technologies have recently attracted tremendous attention due to their potential applications in soft robotics, human motion detection, prosthetics, and personalized healthcare monitoring. Remarkable advances in materials science, nanotechnology, and biotechnology have led to the development of various wearable and stretchable sensors. For example, researchers including us have developed resistive and capacitive-type strain and pressure sensors and demonstrated their use in soft robotics, tactile sensing and perception, and human body motion detection.