Reza, my postdoc advisor visited the lab. It was great seeing him in London.

Enjoyed getting feedback from medical doctors on our robotic patient and soft probe for remote examination @ImperialDE pic.twitter.com/YwsAdUEeJQ

— Thrishlab, Dyson School of Design Engineering, ICL (@thrishlab) 22 February 2018

Prof. Simon Lusignan, a General Practitioner, examining our robotic patient,: https://t.co/PZ8L8SCgfn via @YouTube

— Thrishlab, Dyson School of Design Engineering, ICL (@thrishlab) 23 February 2018

Thrish gave a plenary keynote speech at IEEE PIMRC, one of the leading mobile communication conferences in the World. The talk focused on how living beings survive in uncertain environments that require fast responses with a central nervous system (CNS) known to have very slow communication fibers (a signal from fingertip to brain takes about 120msec). Most rapid responses cannot be explained using such slow communication pathways.

The talk using robotic experimental evidence on the role of fast bodily computers (morphological computers) that work in conjunction with the CNS helped to challenge the conventional notion that the slow CNS is entirely responsible for intelligent behavior. This aligned well with the latest trends in 5G communication where field experts argue that some new decentralized solutions are required to go beyond the current bottlenecks. Link

Papers on ‘A Geometry Deformation Model for Braided Continuum Manipulators’ and ‘Mechanics of Continuum Manipulators, A Comparative Study of Five Methods with Experiments‘ have been accepted in Frontiers in Robotics and AI Journal and TAROS 2017 Conference, respectively. The findings, described in these papers, provide a deep insight into comprehensive modeling of braided continuum manipulators for surgery applications.

Paper on ‘Palpation Force Modulation Strategies to Identify Hard Regions in Soft Tissue Organs’ has been accepted in PLOS ONE. The findings, described in the paper, have the potential to change how robots will be used in the future for soft tissue examination like in cancer surgery, food industry, agriculture, airport security.

http://video.ft.com/4877706101001/My-colleague-the-robot/Companies

Psychoanalyst Darian Leader’s new book looks at the culture and psychology of the human hand. He joins Matthew Sweet along with art historian Lisa Le Feuvre, currently curating an exhibition on sculpture and prosthesis at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, and robotics scientist Thrishantha Nanayakkara from King’s College London, who works on the problem of engineering a functioning hand from scratch…more

EPSRC just confirmed that we will be funded to lead a major UK based research consortium. See details here.

PhD candidate Hadi Sadati has been appointed as a member of the newsletter team of IEEE soft robotics technical committee.