Paper Accepted for Haptic Symposium

My research on a novel miniture robot gripper for tele-operated palpation has been accepted for presentation at Haptics Symposium 2012 in Vancouver.

Haptics Symposium Logo

Palpation is defined in the Oxford English dictionary as "[to] examine (a part of the body) by touch, especially for medical purposes". 

My submitted paper involved a bio-inspired approach to electromechanical device design, where the finger motions of surgeons were studied during exploratory scenarios in order to set a number of functional objectives for the device. The other design requirements were set by the proposed application of minimally invasive surgery.

The Question in Disability Now

Despite many things happening in the last few months (such as handing in my thesis), I've been very poor at updating this blog.

Here's a link to an article on The Question I just discovered in the magazine Disability Now. The Question was a collaborative piece I did with Extant last summer, where we developed the Haptic Lotus.

Here's a snippet from the full story:

Arguably one of Extant’s most breathtaking (and currently on-going) works to date, The Question (2009/2010) utilises the Live Art concept with open arms. It has everything: the tactile audience experience, the walk-through installation, the use of audio and live performers.

Humanoids 2010

My paper for the IEEE Humanoids 2010 conference has been accepted for publication.

The paper looks at using neural networks to observe and learn a small number of human reaching motions that have been scaled to a robot body. The neural network is then able to generalise these examples for new requirements, so the robot can generate new human-like trajectories on the fly.

Below is a word cloud of the paper, which was generated by Wordle.

This was the most recent piece of work I completed for my PhD on human motion synthesis for manipulator robots.

The Question conference acceptance

Our submissions on 'The Question' have been accepted to the following conferences:

* DRHA2010 (Digital Resources for Humanities and Arts)

* MobileHCI2010 (Mobile Human Computer Interaction)

We may be doing a scaled down version of the installation (complete with Haptic Lotus) for the DRHA conference (in Brunel University). I'm sure that some hands-on technology will be accompanying the MobileHCI presentation (in Lisbon).

Both conferences are taking place in the first week of September.