About Me

I am currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Imperial College London, working with Prof. Ravi Vaidyanathan in Biomechatronics Lab. My research interest lies in the intersection between bio-inspired robotics design, multi-sensor fusion and machine learning (especially morphological computing) and their applications in the real world, e.g., medical robots, robot perception & navigation, and multimodal sensing fusion.

Prior to that, I received a PhD degree in Robotics & Artificial Intelligence from Imperial College London, working in the Morph Lab with Prof.Thrishantha Nanayakkara ! and Prof.Peter Childs FREng !

My current research project is about the soft wearable sensor for health monitoring, along with the mobile robot providing service.

Please email me if you are interested in my research and I’m open to any potential collaboration

Contact

Email: z.yu18 at imperial.ac.uk

News

• Feb 2024: A paper’Human Factors and Human-in-the-Loop; Prosthetics and Exoskeletons; Rehabilitation Robotics’ is accepted by ICRA 2024.
• Jun 2023: I was awarded the Dame Julia Higgins Engineering Postdoc Collaborative Research Fund entitled “An open-source testing kit for emulating the neural processing of tactile stimuli”. This project aims to design low-power and affordable hardware for processing tactile stimuli and emulate the tactile processing pathway with accessible off-the-shelf hardware, thus allowing to generation of data easily to inform the design of better haptic feedback in prostheses.
• Jun 2023: I have been awarded the Dame Julia Higgins Engineering Postdoc Collaborative Research Fund entitled ‘Wearable Urine Volume Measuring Device Designed for Non-Invasive and Easy-Access Bladder Function Monitoring’. This project aims to propose the development of a wearable device capable of non-invasively and accurately scanning the bladder to track urine volume.
• May 2023: I was awarded the Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) Pioneers 2023, a 30-strong cohort of the world’s top early-career researchers in robotics. I was invited to Korea to participate in this year’s RSS conference, as well as the Pioneer workshop, to introduce my research. I was the first representative from Imperial College London in this prestigious robot award program, which has already been held for six editions.
• Jan 2023: I am starting to work as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Imperial College London, working with Prof. Ravi Vaidyanathan in Biomechatronics Lab.
• Jan 2023: I have been invited to make a presentation ‘Towards the Future of Physical Neural Networks for Offroad Robot Environment Perception and Navigation’ at Harbin Institute of Technology, China (online)
• Dec 2022: I have been invited to make a presentation of Physical Reservoir Computing at School of Mechanical Engineering，Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China (online)
• Dec 2022: I have been invited to make a presentation of my PhD research about the reservoir computing at The Young Investigators Symposium on Frontiers in Innovative Technology (FIT) hosted by the University of Michigan-Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute (JI), Shanghai (online).

• Jun 2022: Invited to make a presentation of robotics morphlogical computation at School of Mechanical Engineering and Automation， Beihang University, China (online) China (online)
• May 2022: Paper oral presentation at 2022 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2022)
• Apr 2022: I have been awarded the Amazon PhD Prizes for Outstanding Achievement in Robotics for my PhD research!
• Apr 2022: Paper selected to make an oral presentation at 2022 IEEE 5th International Conference on Soft Robotics!
• Mar 2022: Invited to give a talk at 2nd International Conference on Embodied Intelligence (online)!
• Oct 2021: I visited the Robotics and System Intelligence Lab of the Technical University of Munich,funded by the TUM Global Incentive Fund.
• Mar 2021: I made a paper oral presentation at 2021 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2021)!
• Aug 2019: I visited the Airbus and University of Toulouse, full scholarship provided by Airbus and French Ministry of Education!
• Mar 2019: I joined the Morph Lab, Imperial College London, and started my PhD research, founed by the Imperial College – China Scholarship Council PhD Scholarship.
• Jun 2018: I was an exchange Master student at Israel Institute of Technology, full scholarship provided by the The Council for Higher Education in Israe.