I am delighted to announce that I am awarded the John Moyes Lessells Travel Scholarship from the Royal Society of Edinburgh to carry out research in Japan with Prof. Koh Hosoda of Osaka University. The scholarship is open to all branches of engineering in Scotland. I am glad that mine stood out because engineering covers so many applications.
The project is to combine the key concepts from my PhD, which is summarised by “Apply port-Hamiltonian approach to everything” with Koh’s soft pneumatic humanoid robotic platforms see the headless robot (illustration curtesy of Hosoda Lab).
The collaboration started when I first met Koh in first RoboSoft 2018, in Livorno, Italy. Then we met again in BioRob 2018 in Twente, The Netherlands. I noted awkwardly that he wore the same shirt from Livorno and the conversation starter was, “That is a very nice shirt” (With hindsight, I should have also said that I recognised him by his face). I explained my research interests and previous attempts on the JSPS program (UK students spend time in Japan). He was interested in the port-Hamiltonian approach, when we were touring Prof. Stefano Stramigioli’s Lab in University of Twente. Stefano wrote the textbook on port-Hamiltonian approach.
Port-Hamiltonian approach is a way to reformulate a system to gain additional insights, as I presented in the second IEEE conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft) in Seoul. The purpose of the approach is to reformulate the total energy of the system into active and conservative energy subsystems, which can be further used for characterisation, or controlling, or modelling purposes. The energy level abstraction enables me to focus on the overall system instead of focusing on the complex forces and deformations.
Koh Hosoda’s lab use pneumatic actuators in humanoid robotics and I am interested in this field, the junction of soft actuation and humanoid robotics for assistive devices. He also works on biological muscle actuators, using electrical stimulus on biological muscle cells for actuation. One of the examples is extracting the leg muscles from frogs to make a frog cyborg. I wondered why he didn’t call it Cyfrog.
My advices for students are, to keep applying, network with awkward conversation starters, and present your PhD project passionately to the selection committee and anyone else.
Figure 1. I just have to digest the 442 page textbook, squeeze it into the humanoid robotic platform and make some modifications to modulate the system from an energy point of view. Screenshot from https://www.rse.org.uk/awards/john-moyes-lessells-travel-scholarships/ , book cover from “Duindam, V., Macchelli, A., Stramigioli, S. and Bruyninckx, H. eds., 2009. Modeling and control of complex physical systems: The port-Hamiltonian approach. Springer Science”, and the illustration from Hosoda Lab.
Recent Comments