Organizers

Dr Xing Wang Joined CSIRO Data61 in 2022 as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Robotics Design and Interaction Group. He studied Mechanical Engineering before completing his PhD in Robotics at Monash University in 2022. His PhD mainly focused on the soft robotic gripper and deep-learning-based visual guidance in agriculture applications. Xing’s research interests are the autonomous design of soft robotics, deep-learning-based fruit detection, segmentation, Lidar-camera calibration, tactile sensing etc. His research in CSIRO mainly lies in developing bespoke autonomous soft robotic designs with AI algorithms. 

Dr Joshua Pinskier joined CSIRO Data61 in 2020 as a postdoctoral fellow in the Robotics and Autonomous Systems Group's Material Robotics team. He has previously studied mechatronics engineering and commerce at Monash University before completing his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Monash in 2019. His current research interests are in soft robotics, computational design, and autonomous manufacturing. 

A/Prof. Chen joined the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Monash University as a Lecturer in 2007, and has been a Senior Lecturer since 2011. He is also an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He was a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, and a Visiting Professor in IRCCyN, Ecole Central de Nantes and Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

A/Professor Chen established the Laboratory of Motion Generation and Analysis (LMGA) at Monash University and has been the director of LMGA since 2008. The mission of LMGA is to solve real world challenges for better industry and society by means of advanced robotic technologies. The research activities include medical robots, agriculture robots, and infrastructure robots. The research focuses are on design of robots and mechanisms, robotic dynamics and control, path planning, and robotic intelligence. The robotic systems developed by his group include a Robotic Transverse Profiler (successfully delivered to the Australian Road Research Board in 2016), a 3D Printed Prosthetic Hand (received 2017 Award by Australian Hand Therapy Association), and an Apple Harvesting Robot (exhibited in 2019 Global AI Product and Application EXPO).

Prof. Mirko Kovac is Director, Laboratory of Sustainability Robotics at Empa Switzerland and Aerial Robotics Laboratory at Imperial College, London UK. He is also an adjunct professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) in the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC). 

He is internationally recognized leader in aerial robotics and working on a mission on development of minimally invasive robotics and AI technologies to measure and modify environments and deliver sustainable outcomes. His research focuses on the development of novel, biologically inspired flying robots for distributed sensing in air and water and autonomous robotic construction for digital infrastructure systems for industry 5.0 applications. His research group is specialized in robot design, hardware development and multi-modal robot mobility. At Laboratory of Sustainability Robotics, Empa, we are developing novel materials allowing tight integration to robot functionality and operational robustness and allow development of robotic organs and an associated full integration of embodied artificial intelligence in future engineering systems. The group research is also focuses on developing bio-hybrid systems integrating biological materials such as muscle cells, functional cellulose, fungi substrate with robotic systems.

Prof. Kovac has over 15 years of research experience from Imperial College, London and at Harvard University He has been awarded >12.4m Euro for his cross-disciplinary projects and has published >100 peer-reviewed articles in leading robotics journals and at conferences (including, Nature, Science, Nature Machine Intelligence and Science Robotics). Prof. Kovac’s research work has received >1100 media mentions, and he regularly acts as an advisor to robotics investment funds and government including a consultation to the UK House of Lords. He has received the prestigious Royal Society Wolfson award in 2018 and an ERC Consolidator grant (funded by SERI) in 2021. Prof. Kovac is also Director of Centre of Excellence in Infrastructure Robotics Ecosystems (Ceire) at Imperial College London.

Prof. Fumiya Iida is a professor of robotics at the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge. He received his bachelor and master degrees in mechanical engineering at Tokyo University of Science (Japan, 1999), and Dr. sc. nat. in Informatics at University of Zurich (2006). In 2004 and 2005, he was also engaged in biomechanics research of human locomotion at Locomotion Laboratory, University of Jena (Germany). From 2006 to 2009, he worked as a postdoctoral associate at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology in USA. In 2006, he was awarded the Fellowship for Prospective Researchers from the Swiss National Science Foundation, and in 2009, he was appointed as a Swiss National Science Foundation Professor for bio-inspired robotics at ETH Zurich. His research interests include biologically inspired robotics, embodied artificial intelligence, and biomechanics, and he has been involved in a number of research projects related to dynamic legged locomotion, navigation of autonomous robots, and human-machine interactions. He has so far published over forty publications in major robotics journals and conferences, and edited two books. Currently he serves on the editorial board of the Soft Robotics Journal, Frontiers in Robotics and AI (Bio-Inspired Robotics Section), and as a program committee member for international conferences and workshops. In addition, he has organized a few seminal meetings such as the International Conference of Embodied Intelligence, RoboSoft, and TAROS.