Informatics students' robotics paper published

A paper by a group of undergraduate students under the supervision of Dr Thrishantha Nanayakkara, Senior Lecturer in Robotics in the Department of Informatics, has been accepted to be published in the proceedings of the prestigious International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2012).

Fabio Bianchi, Giulia Bartoli, Kya Shoar, Maria R Armas Fernandez and Valerio Pereno are currently in their fourth year of undergraduate studies. During their third year, they participated in research into the locomotion of legged robots on uncertain terrain, specifically building an experimental setup involving a rimless wheel to analyse collision point behaviour of a robot walking on changing ground conditions.

Following this, their paper, 'Adaptive Internal Impedance Control for Stable Walking on Uncertain Visco-elastic Terrains', was accepted to be published in the proceedings of IROS 2012, where this year’s paper acceptance rate was 45 per cent. Together with another five papers from King's Department of Informatics presented at this conference, the paper discussed concepts at the forefront of robotics research today.

Also accepted for publication in the above conference was a paper co-authored by Simon Goulder, another undergraduate student supervised by Dr Nanayakkara, titled 'Adaptive grip control on an uncertain object'. This work is potentially useful for robots in minimally invasive surgery to handle pulsating tissues and organs like arteries, lungs and the heart.