The soft robotics market is growing roughly at 35% CAGR. These robots together with COBOTS (collaborative robots) are expected to transform many industries including agriculture, food, and hospitality.
In this talk, I will show some of the recent results to discuss how soft robots have been useful for us to understand some secrets behind how humans and other animals deal with uncertain natural environments.
I will also speculate some future breakthroughs that can disrupt the way the human society will be empowered by robots and other intelligent consumer goods.
I will conclude with some remarks on the need for broad collaboration among robotics, economics, policy, and human experience design communities to create opportunities for broad communities who would otherwise be marginalised.
About our speaker: Professor Thrishantha Nanayakkara, Imperial College London
Professor Thrishantha Nanayakkara is the director of the Morphlab, Dyson School of Design Engineering, Imperial College London.
He is also the present speaker of the Imperial Robotics Forum consisting of 44 Robotics Principal Investigators, and one of the three directors of the UK RAS Strategic task group for soft robotics.
His research interests are in taking a soft robotics approach to understand the nature of the shared computation between the nervous system and the physical body of biological beings.
He has research experience at Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University, and MIT before moving to UK. He has published more than 150 peer reviewed papers in flagship robotics journals and conferences.
He is in the editorial board of Scientific Reports in Nature Publishing Group, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Frontiers Mechatronics, and Journal of Robotics and Mechatronics.For more details, please visit: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/morph-lab