Blog and Group News
Fluidic FlowBots: Intelligence embodied in the characteristics of recirculating fluid flow
Pre-print, accepted to RoboSoft 2024
Maks Gepner, Jonah Mack, Francesco Giorgio-Serchi, Adam A. Stokes
A short guide to Multidisciplinary Research
How and Why would I consider colliding two opposite disciplines in my research This guide to ‘colliding opposite disciplines with your research’ is intended to help students and researchers, or indeed anyone who might otherwise be looking for some ideas on how to...
Design and Fabrication of a Fully-Integrated, Miniaturised Fluidic System for the Analysis of Enzyme Kinetics
Micromachines, 2023
Andreas Tsiamis, Anthony Buchoux, Stephen T. Mahon, Anthony J. Walton, Stewart Smith, David J. Clarke and Adam A. Stokes
Stretchable e-skin and transformer enable high-resolution morphological reconstruction for soft robots
Nature Machine Intelligence, 2023
Delin Hu, Francesco Giorgio-Serchi, Shiming Zhang & Yunjie Yang
Soft Robots for Ocean Exploration and Offshore Operations: A Perspective
Most of the ocean is unknown, yet we know that the most challenging environments on the planet reside in it. Understanding the ocean in its totality is a key component for the sustainable development of human activities and for the mitigation of climate change, as...
2020 in The Soft Systems Group
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 Systems Approach to Real-World Deployment of Industrial Internet of Things
Offshore industries are facing a shortfall in the workforce, primarily due to extreme working conditions. Monitoring offshore assets is crucial to reducing production cost. Technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) are rapidly gaining confidence for providing...
Rapid 3D printing of personalised protective face masks to World Health Organization (WHO) standard for healthcare workers
Soft Systems group director Dr Adam Stokes is lead investigator, along with several other distinguished Co-investigators on a Chief Scientist Office (CSO) funded project for printing 3D protective facemasks. The grant was part of Rapid Research in COVID-19 related...
Finalist: 2020 Top 50 Women in Engineering – Sustainability
In June of this year, I am very pleased to announce that, I was awarded the title of Finalist, 2020 Top 50 Women in Engineering: Sustainability. Each year the Women’s Engineering Society (WES) hosts an International Women in Engineering Day (INWED) which celebrates...
Limpet II: A Modular, Untethered Soft Robot
Offshore platforms are massively complex and unstructured environments consisting of structures at different angles, steep inclines, and inverted surfaces. To navigate such unstructured environments efficiently and to be useful for inspection...
UK-RAS20: “Robots into the real world”
In this uncertain time, I feel refreshed to see how resilient communities have been in the face of adversity. Within the scientific community, the shift to virtual hosting of conferences meant I was still able to present my recent (and first!) conference paper at the...
Are we letting off enough STEAM?
If we think of the Arts and Science then I think, for the most part, that people would think of them as opposites. People are either ‘arty’ or ‘science-y'. A large factor in this thinking may come from the fact that people are seen as left-brained or right-brained,...
Special Issue on “Self-Assembling Systems” in Advanced Intelligent Systems Journal
We are excited to announce that we will be guest editing an Advanced Intelligent Systems special issue on Self-Assembling Systems. The guest editors on this special issue are: Dr. Mohammed E. Sayed (Post-Doctoral Research Associate in the Soft Systems Group,...
Self-Assembling and Reconfigurable Systems – ICRA Workshop 2020
It has been a trying time for all of us and we hope that you are coping well. As you may be aware ICRA 2020 is just around the corner and, thankfully, will continue in a virtual format. We can all look forward to seeing the field’s progress this year, the opportunity...
Limpet Team meet the Public
It has been a busy time for both the Limpet and Limpet team as a whole. In the past month we have: Demonstrated our research to Edinburgh South West MP, Joanna Cherry Exhibited the Limpet system at DemoFest 2019 Run multiple ‘Day of Robotics’ at Heriot-Watt University...
Appointment to the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Soft Robotics
I am delighted to be appointed to the new position of Student Chapter Chair for the IEEE Robotics and Autonomation Society Technical Committee on Soft Robotics following the Second IEEE International Conference on Soft Robotics held in Seoul in April. This newly...
Limpets Return to London
The Limpet has returned to London, but this time it was not being deployed at Imperial College London but being presented at the Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS) in Offshore Wind Operation and Maintenance (O&M) Services event held in Institute of Mechanical...
Limpets in Space
I was part of the delegation from ORCA to present our work at the TCC - Automation, AI & Robotics workshop hosted by the NASA Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas on the 27th and 28th of March. The trip began with a short flight from Edinburgh to London of 1...
John Moyes Lessells Travel Scholarship to Osaka, Japan!
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...
RoboSoft 2019 – Soft Robot Design, Development, and Manufacture – Insights from Industrial Applications
Soft robotics represents a new paradigm in terms of mechanics, control and power supply compared to traditional hard robotics. The potential for these systems is being explored where traditional industrial robots are unsafe for delicate interaction. Many innovative...
RoboSoft 2019 -Soft Robotics for Extreme Environments: Removing Electronic Control
The offshore oil and gas industry is an extreme environment for humans and the industry faces increasing pressure to remove people from these dangerous offshore sites. Robotics is poised to carry out the day-to-day inspection, repair and maintenance of topside and...
Paper accepted for RoboSoft 2019: “Towards more Energy Efficient Pneumatic Soft Actuators using a Port-Hamiltonian Approach”
RoboSoft 2019 I am delighted to write about my recent paper acceptance for the 2019 IEEE International Conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft). My research topic is in soft robotics and as the name suggests, it is related to my topic. I am proud for my work to be...
Bubble Dislodgment in a Capillary Network with Microscopic Multichannels and Multibifurcation Features
Bubble lodgement in a complex capillary network is a common issue in many industrial and biological processes. In medical applications, embolotherapy, a potential cancer treatment, utilises bubble lodgement to achieve the occlusion of the arteriole or capillary in...
Aquatic Soft Robots
Photo credits: Simona Aracri In order to forecast increasingly common extreme weather events climate scientists need a deeper understanding of the role played by the abyssal ocean in their weather prediction models. Oceanographic cruises are...
Five PDRA Positions in Robotics for Extreme Environments: Connect-R
Apply Now: www.vacancies.ed.ac.uk ; Reference: 046991 ; Closing Date 18th March 2019 Operations in hostile environments--such as those found in Nuclear Decommissioning, Oil and Gas, Mining, and Space--require the execution of sophisticated tasks. Examples of these...
Centre for Doctoral Training in Robotics and Autonomous Systems
The EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Robotics and Autonomous Systems (CDT-RAS), hosted at the Edinburgh Centre of Robotics, is leading in the UK effort to realise its industrial potential in this revolution, by producing a new generation of highly...
Soft Radio-Frequency Identification Sensors: Wireless Long-Range Strain Sensors Using Radio-Frequency Identification
In recent decades, increasing amounts of attention are being paid to the study of Soft Sensors and Soft Robotic Systems. The concept of integrating sensing capabilities into soft robotic systems is becoming increasingly important since soft sensors can help a soft...
Linbots: Soft Modular Robots Utilizing Voice Coils
Modular robots are groups of robots that can be connected to accomplish tasks. Groups of cheaper, smaller robots are more robust than using single robots to accomplish tasks. We have developed modular robots that mimic the extension and contraction of biological...
The Limpet: A ROS-Enabled Multi-Sensing Platform for the ORCA Hub
The oil and gas industry faces increasing pressure to remove people from dangerous offshore environments. There have been several reported accidents and explosions of offshore rigs, with the most widely reported tragedy being the Deep Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of...
Managing Water Resources
When you work in science, you are supposed to find your own niche, find your own contact angle, and find your own unusual question. Then you go to conferences and write papers to share it. ORCA Hub, the project that we are working on, focuses on offshore industry...
Limpet Trials and Tribulations
A two-part journey of the Limpet and its first underwater trials in Fort William Part (1) On the 27th of June we left Edinburgh by car (after a short delay collecting it) in a beautiful sunny morning to travel to Fort William where the scenery was much admired by all....
Increasing the Capabilities in Soft Robots by Stacking
Rigid and ‘hard’ traditional robots are going to hurt if they hit you. This makes robot and human interaction tricky and we need to add sensors and use clever methods to avoid this. Soft robots are a new class of robot that are made of soft and spongy materials and...
New Bespoke 3D Printer
Boring power point presentations are not the only use for video projectors, they can also be part of a 3D printers. When used as a light source to solidify an acrylic resin, we can make a 3D printer. The printer is using the video projector, meant for watching movies,...
Embracing and Detecting Collisions
Collisions occur in nature all the time. They range from cellular collisions in cell migration to humans colliding while navigating through crowds. In robotics research, we learned that collisions must be avoided to protect the robot and its surroundings. However, I...
Electrowetting 2018 in Twente
We had the great pleasure to present our research on magnetowetting and electrohydrodynamics at the Electrowetting 2018 conference, which took place on 17th - 20th June at the University of Twente. The conference was well-attended by an international audience and...
Multi-functional Sensing for Swarm Robots
To conduct experiments1 with large groups of robots you have to pay for large groups of robots. Specifically, you must pay for the number of robots multiplied by the cost per single robot. And, what is the easiest way to keep the cost per single robot low? You make...
Limpet travelling
In the last week we covered more than a 1000 km distance by train and 3 cities to meet with scientists working on the ORCA project. We left Edinburgh early in the morning on Monday. With hot coffees in our hands, we jumped on a train to London at Waverly station....
‘Stargazing with Stephen Hawking’ and upcoming Scientific Journal Club
The scientific journal club at the Institute for Integrated Micro & Nano Systems at the University of Edinburgh is a student-organised, casual discussion group. We meet fortnightly during semester time to discuss current scientific news and have covered a wide...
A report on the RoboSoft workshop – Soft-bodied structures in nature and robotics: towards new trends and opportunities
The anchorage town of Livorno sits in the heart of Tuscany surrounded by the rural landscape of central Italy. The wonderful marina of Livorna set the scene and provided a charming location for an engaging RoboSoft conference. This meeting provided an opportunity...
IEEE International Conference on Soft Robotics: Robosoft 2018
I was delighted to serve as an organising committee member and workshop chair for the recent IEEE International Conference on Soft Robotics (Robosoft) held in Livorno, Italy. I was joined by PhD students Derek Chun and Stephen Mahon. We had over 300 delegates, seven...
Success for Jennifer Dodoo
We are delighted that group member Jennifer Dodoo won the Best Two-Minute Presentation prize at the University of Edinburgh School of Engineering Research Conference 2018. Her presentation, titled ‘A Holistic Review of Electrohydrodyamics’, stressed the relevance of...
All Hands
On 11th April academics working on the Orca Hub project met to discuss the state of the project, to show demonstration, prototypes, data and to brain storm about future development of the project. In the morning David Lane entertained us with his colourful...
Materials Research Society Spring Meeting 2018 – Pheonix
I recently travelled to Pheonix Arizona to organise a symposium at the Materials Research Society Spring Meeting. Together with Professor Stephen Morin, Professor Robert Shepherd, and Professor Ozge Akbulut we ran a hugely successful symposium entitled "Soft...
Primary Engineer – Inspiring future engineers
This year, the University of Edinburgh has become a partner of the Primary Engineer programme. Primary Engineer is a non-profit organisation that promotes engineering skills and careers to Primary School pupils, by working closely with local schools, authorities and...
Scientific Journal Club discussion and upcoming seminar on Stephen Hawking’s Life and Work
On Thursday last week, a group of five postgraduate researchers got together at the IMNS to discuss the life and work of Stephen Hawking over cake and coffee. The discussion started off with a good look at Hawking’s 1975 paper on Particle Creation by Black Holes, but...
Scientific Journal Club at the IMNS
The scientific journal club at the Institute for Integrated Micro & Nano Systems at the University of Edinburgh is a student-organised, casual discussion group. We meet fortnightly during semester time to discuss current scientific news and have covered a wide...
ORCA WP4 Workshop
The Offshore Robotics for Certification of Assets (ORCA) WP4 workshop was held in Edinburgh. The workshop was an exciting opportunity to gauge and merge the academic and industrial view of ORCA. Under ORCA's umbrella, diverse and broad expertise comes together:...
Using Conductive Thread for Integration of Hard and Soft Electronic Components Within Soft Sensor Systems
We are part of growing community of researchers who are developing a new class of fully integrated soft machines that include power, communications, and control sub-systems. From our point of view, including Integrated circuit (IC) microelectronics into soft machines...
European Robotics League – Service Robot
Edinburgh Centre for Robotics (ECR) hosted its first European Robotics League for Service Robots (ERL-SR). The competition took place in Heriot-Watt University’s custom-built living laboratory. I volunteered to be part of the refereeing team. Hosting the competition...
We Are Hiring Research Associates in Sensors and Offshore Robotics
The School of Engineering is recruiting three Research Associates to perform cutting-edge research on Sensors, Sensor Networks and Robotics (Subsea, Top-Side and Air) applied to the offshore energy sector. This recruitment is part of the ORCA Hub, a large Robotics and...
From Hard To Soft Systems: Using Soft Materials to Encapsulate Off-The-Shelf Electronic Components
Consumer demand for stretchable and flexible electronic devices is a growth area within the electronics industry. Fibreglass-based printed circuit boards are evolving into flexible and stretchable wearable-electronic systems. This technology promises to expand the...
Unlocking the Potential of Soft Robotics with the Robotic Operating System
Building your own soft robots can be a daunting task for someone just setting out. Even after building the robot you still need to sort out control systems and software to get it working. Our work on open-source tools for soft robotics is paving the way for the easy...
RoboSoft 2018: The First IEEE-RAS International Conference on Soft Robotics
http://www.robosoft2018.org Description Soft robotics is a recent exciting trend of robotics, taking the challenge of using soft materials and deformable structures for building robots, with high potential for impact in science and in applications. Given the young and...
Smart Soft Robotics for Stroke Rehabilitation
The culmination of work by Alistair C. McConnell (lead-researcher) through his PhD and the SOPHIA team, the Soft Orthotic Physiotherapy Hand Interactive Aid (SOPHIA) forms the foundation for our future research into Soft Robotic rehabilitation systems. Through...
IEEE Sensors 2017
The IEEE Sensors 2017 conference took place in Glasgow on 30th October until 1st November. With keynote speakers Prof Sheila Rowan, Dr John Kitching, and Prof George Malliaras, this international meeting was packed with high-profile researchers and fascinating talks,...
Ultra manufacturable PCB-only robots unlock Swarm Intelligence research
After one and a half years of dedicated work by Markus P. Nemitz (lead-researcher) and colleagues, the HoverBot system becomes a central research tool to the Stokes Research Group. This work started when we discovered that there was a lack of affordable robots that...
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