Title: Soft Robotics and Its Potential in Industry and Research
Date: Thursday, 16 December 2021
Time: 4:00 PM (Malaysian Standard Time)
Speakers: Dr. Surya Nurzaman and Prof. Edwin Tan Chee Pin

In the last decade, research on robots at least partially made of soft materials has gained increasing interest. It is expected that this emerging field, commonly known as soft robotics, can help realize robotic systems that are safer, cheaper, and more adaptable than the level that the conventional rigid-material robots can achieve. This talk will outline the motivation, challenges and potential applications of soft robotics in various fields. In the second part of this talk, we will focus on a challenge related to sensor integration in soft robotics, and explain the concept and implementation of indirect sensing as our proposed solution to address the challenge.

Surya G. Nurzaman is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Engineering, Monash University Malaysia. He obtained his PhD from Osaka University, Japan, in 2011, with the support of the Monbukagakusho scholarship from the Japanese government. Before joining Monash, he was a Research Fellow in Osaka University (Japan), ETH Zürich (Switzerland) and University of Cambridge (UK) from 2011 to 2015. Prior to coming to Japan in 2007, he finished his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Institute of Technology Bandung (Indonesia), and worked as a technology consultant in Accenture for a few years, accomplishing various projects in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and United States. His research interests include soft robotics, bio-inspired robotics, embodied intelligence, dynamical systems and machine learning. He’s an Associate Editor of IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine, Frontiers in Robotics & AI, and an Advisory Board Member of IEEE Technical Committee on Soft Robotics.

Tan Chee Pin (Edwin) graduated with the Bachelor of Electrical & Electronic Engineering from Leicester University, UK, in 1998, and a Ph.D. from the same university in 2002. Subsequently, he joined Monash University Malaysia where he is now a Professor and the Head of the Robotics & Mechatronics Engineering program. His research interests remain largely in the estimation of states and unknown inputs, and their applications in various fields such as soft robotics, renewable energy, and traffic/transport. He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of the Franklin Institute, and the International Journal of Systems Science.