As we look forward to 2021 I feel it’s appropriate to look back over 2020 and highlight the successes and challenges, the arrivals and departures, and the highs and lows that have come with this unprecedented year. Below is a month-by-month synopsis of the year, with a heavy bias towards the successes that kept us going.
January
2019 finished on a high, Jenny and Ross succesfully defended their PhD theses and I was delighted to examine Martin Garrad for his PhD at The University of Bristol. Jenny started her new position as a PDRA at Strathclyde, and Ross with a robotics start-up. We had a huge research proposal in the works, this was a multi-million pound project that had taken up much of 2019 in the preparation. January was much the same as normal, firing on all cylinders – teaching, research, administration – kids in school/nursery, planning out the usual travel plans for 2020: conferences, invited talks, review panels etc.
The group was buoyant in January, we had 20 people all working away in the lab on robotics, fluidics, complexity-science.
February
February was more of the same: we had some great papers accepted; Simona, Karen, Alistair, and I were running weekly excellent Robotics Masterclasses at West Linton Primary School, and I was delivering lectures for my lab-on-chip course in-person… in a lecture theatre…
Kyle received news that he had been awarded a prestigious JSPS scholarship to go and study in Japan, and the ORCA Engineering team had the BlueROV running in the Flowave Tank. Alistair presented his work at ICOT 2020 and we received some excellent news that we had been successful in our bid to host a major international conference here in Edinburgh (the news is still under embargo).
March
At the start of March I gave a plenary talk to the DFG funded priority programme on Soft Robotics in Germany, although I erred on the side of caution and gave this lecture online as the number of Covid-19 cases that were being reported in Germany gave me cause for concern. The primary school masterclasses were cancelled in the first week of March, and from the second week I advised the group to start working from home. On the 19th March, in response to the impending crisis and after many phone-calls with other concerned friends, I created a new Slack Group “Edinburgh Covid-19 Engineering”, and then on the 23rd March we entered the national lockdown. With the schools and nurseries closed, I and other members of the Soft Systems Group with children were forced to adapt to a new routine of juggling our time and commitments alongside childcare and home-schooling. The lockdown meant that, for our international group, many travel plans to see family were cancelled and there emerged a sense of anxiety for our loved ones at home and overseas.
Edinburgh Covid-19 Engineering came to be a major focus of mine for the rest of 2020, together with Andrew Coleman, Aidan Roche, Ken Stewart, Ian Archer, Zaki Hussein, Cameron McNatt, Karen Donaldson, Alistair McConnell, Edwige Ravry, Dave Swan, Andy Barr… and many more early members, we created a community for discussing the challenges that lay ahead and pragmatic engineering approaches to solving them. The primary challenges that we identified (and that we had the skills to address) were: 1.) the lack of ventilators, 2.) disruption to the supply of facemasks and visors, and 3.) the need for disinfectants and sanitisers. The slack-group ballooned to over 150 members from a cross section of NHS, Universities, Policy, Engineering, and Tech Companies.
For me the group did two things: it gave me a well needed distraction from the chaos in the world, and it gave me a sense of purpose and direction during the global pandemic.
The biggest change, from a research perspective, of the move to home working was the lack of non-transactional interactions. The culture that we have in the group is based upon sharing of ideas and problems, working together in small groups on new and interesting ideas, calling for help from group members on the spur of the moment during a difficult experiment. Both of our very large funded projects are run in very close collaboration with industrial stakeholders. The shift to home working meant the end of lab work, the end of daily interaction, and the serendipity that comes from working in a dynamic research lab.
Zoom and Slack are excellent tools, but there is simply no substitute for face-to-face interaction.
At the end of March Boyang received news that his application to be an assistant professor in Hong Kong had been succesfull and that he would be leaving the group. Unfortunately the lockdown meant that we could not celebrate his success or give him the usual send-off.
Markus Nemitz (alumnus) was successful in his application to become an assistant professor at WPI, Massachusetts.
April
By April our Edinburgh Covid-19 Engineering group was in full swing and our collective efforts were attracting attention and raising eyebrows. Companies and institutions often say that they want disruptive innovation, but when faced with disruptive ideas and mindset, they are not prepared, or able, to receive it and so they revert to the typical bureaucracy and red-tape that stifles innovation in the first place. Unfortunately, some of our group members were silenced or had to leave, we had grown big and we had many influential members, but innovating without playing by the rules of procurement was not acceptable. Given the subsequent national-news about what happened when procurement of ventilators and PPE was done “correctly” I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions…
I was delighted to be a plenary speaker at the UK-RAS Conference where I spoke about the challenges we experience in bringing robotics into extreme environments to perform tasks that are too dangerous for humans. I also reflected on the fact that “extreme environments” previously meant nuclear facilities, off shore energy, deep-sea mining – but since the pandemic that category now included schools, hospitals, and restaurants.
I have always been, and I remain, passionate about bringing the innovations from research labs into the real-world to provide impact. I was inspired by a scheme that Andrew Coleman, Fraser Lusty and Jock Millican had trialled with Filippo Menolascina at Equity Gap, and in April I started a new phase of learning as academic in residence with Archangels. This has been rich learning experience and has allowed me to use my multidisciplinary scientific background to explore peoples’ innovations for which they are seeking angel funding.
By the end of April much of our efforts in the Edinburgh Covid-19 Engineering group had crystallised and focussed on projects for which we were able to obtain funding.
Faiz Iqbal, a post-doc in the Soft Systems Group led on an industrially funded project that leveraged investment from the Impact Acceleration Account – this project was to convert a batch production process to a continuous production process for a local company making a disinfectant product.
I, alongside Andrew Coleman, Ken Stewart, Aidan Roche, and Paul Digard led on a Chief Scientists’ Office project to develop a customised facemask that used a 3D scan of the face and which used replaceable FFP3 filters which were sourced from a resilient, and underexplored, part of the supply chain. This project included a full initial clinical trial and we appointed Alistair McConnell as the lead engineer on the project. Over the following months many members of the group chipped in and helped with this exciting project.
May
In May we applied to the Innovate UK ICURe programme with our fledgling company Fluidic Logic. We aim to deliver solutions in robotics and healthcare where conventional electronic control and electric motors are not suitable. The inventions that we developed as part of our ongoing research into soft robotics, and particularly in the Connect-R project can be used to solve problems in deploying robots in extreme environments.
Simona led on the production of our new video on the Limpet sensor that was funded as part of the ORCA hub Project and we had some papers accepted: on Fludics and how magnetic fields can be used to shape paramagnetic droplets; on the Limpet II – a mobile multisensing robot for asset monitoring; and on Wearable and Stretchable Strain Sensors: Materials, Sensing Mechanisms, and Applications written by Hamid Souri, Hritwick Banerjee, Norbert Radacsi, Ardian Jusufi, Inkyu Park, Metin Sitti, Morteza Amjadi.
And late in May, Markus presented his paper at the online RoboSoft conference, on Soft Non-Volatile Memory for Non-Electronic Information Storage in Soft Robots, I was delighted to co-author this paper with Markus, Daniel, Lukas, Christoffer, and George Whitesides.
June
In June Mohammed el-Sayed (PDRA) and Jamie Roberts (PhD and RA) led the ICRA Self Assembling Systems workshop, which I consider to be an enormous success. We should have run this workshop in-person, in Paris over a number of days, but instead Sayed and Jamie ran a fully online workshop with an incredible line-up of speakers. The workshop explored the synergies of self-assembly across length-scales and between scientific-disciplines.
Kyle was awarded an Electronics Weekly BrightSparks Award, in recognition of his place among the brightest young electronics engineers in the UK today.
Karen was nominated as a finalist one of the top 50 women in Engineering, her nominee explained, “I believe that Karen’s space and agricultural research, encompassing the study of the soil composition on our Earth and other planets, has the potential to influence future agricultural management and to promote sustainable growth, which we are all going to embrace in the years to come. Her work reminds me how vast engineering is and how women can truly be part of any aspect of it.”
July
Together with Stewart Smith and Ron Pethig we are writing a new edition of our textbook: Introductory Bioelectronics. This textbook builds upon our courses that we teach on Biosensors, Bioelectronics, Bioelectronics and Instrumentaion, and Lab-on-a-chip Technologies. July gave me some time to work on the book, as well as some well needed time away from the computer to try and regain some balance, to relax (as far as one can in a pandemic) and to think about refocusing the efforts of the group onto new challenges.
August
In August we were delighted to find out that our application to ICURe was successful, Faiz would spend the next four months focussing on the market discovery journey for our new spin-out: Fludic Logic.
Our biggest success of the year was in winning the Principal’s Award for Innovation, our concept was about how to bridge the reality gap in using robots for safe interaction in extreme environments (nuclear, offshore, disinfecting hospitals etc..). We are writing this work up into a full grant application so I’ll be vague about the details for now.
August saw the viva-examinations and completion of the MSc in Electronics cohort, the decision had been taken earlier in the year to furlough the MSc for the 2020/21 academic year as a result of the pandemic.
At the end of August we said goodbye to our longest serving group member, Anthony Buchoux, who left Edinburgh with one more wife, two more children, and three more degrees than when he moved here eleven years ago.
September
September saw the start of the new academic year, I took over all of the bioelectronics teaching and I’d spent the summer preparing a new course designed around flipped-classroom and hybrid seminars. The work involved in developing this new course took me by surprise, I’ve developed a few courses from scratch before, but this time there were a whole new set of skills required: video recording, editing, subtitling, design of a resilient course with 24-hour open-book take-home exams. Luckily the schools opened again in September so there was time available to work on the lectures. Time is a finite resource and finding the balance between teaching, research, and supervision was out of kilter for the rest of semester 1.
David Lane had organised a series of Tortoise Media think-ins which focussed on exploring the “digital tissue” concept that the UK robotics community is rallying behind. These think-ins were excellent, it was great to see such a wide cross section of people coming together to hold an intellectually stimulating and well-facilitated discussion.
October
October was mostly writing grant applications, teaching, and seeing the excellent results from our clinical trials for the 3D-PPE project that Alistair was now dedicating all his time to.
Stephen submitted his PhD and moved to the USA. During his PhD Stephen published a number of papers, won awards, travelled the world, and successfully combined his DNA with his wifes’, twice.
November
November, for me, was teaching… teaching… teaching…
Many of the group applied for Chancellor’s Fellowships in September, and they would later find out that nobody from the group was successful in applying for these tenure-track academic positions. The competition and standard was exceptionally high. Despite the many successes and outstanding quality of our team we found ourselves discussing my oft-quoted maxim: “In academia: rejection is normal, acceptance is the exception.” In blog posts, like the one you’re reading here, academics celebrate success and ignore the failures, heartbreak, and crushed-dreams that are part and parcel of academic life.
Back to successes.
Karen was over the moon to be awarded a place on the highly competitive leadership development programme: Aurora.
December
In December we received embargoed news that some of our grant applications had been successful, we received no-cost extensions to existing funding and we had some more papers accepted including a review of “Soft Robots for Ocean Exploration and Offshore Operations” in Soft Robotics, led by Simona.
I was delighted to be appointed to the academic board of the National Robotarium, I’m really looking forward to working with the Yvan Petilliot and Helen Hastie who are leading the project.
December saw the departure of Simona and Tushar. Simona has headed back to Italy to take a very prestigious role as a CNR group leader, Tushar has headed to Germany to take a role in a start-up (but first to India to get married!).
We had a new arrival in December with Andreas Tsiamis joining the group as a PDRA on the Connect-R project.
So, that’s it. 2020, a year of mixed fortunes, new arrivals, sad departures, unforseen challenges, and new research directions in the group. The low points of the year have been incredibly low: sick family members, the loss of loved ones, leaving the EU… but the end of 2020 also signals hope in the form of the Covid-19 vaccines, and now that we’ve experienced rock-bottom 2021 must be better.
Happy new year to all present and past members of the Soft Systems Group.
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