Human Adaptive Mechatronics Workshop January 2009

The recent Human Adaptive Mechatronics Workshop January 2009 drew participants from as far afield as Japan and China and including Professor Fujio Miyawaki and  Professor Yoshinori Uchikawa from Tokyo Denki University where the the concepts of Human Adaptive Mechatronics were first proposed   Denki is considered a Centre Of Excellence  by the Japanese Government.  Professor Mingcong Deng from Okayama University and six Japanese research students also attended. Along with academic attendees from Italy, UK and China there were a number of people from the UK industry.

Medical themes were followed by Prof Miyawaki who seeks to Develop a Scrub Nurse Robot System that will be able to adapt to individual surgeons, Professor Eric Rogers, University of Southampton, who hopes to improve arm function in stroke victims through the application of iterative learning control and arm modelling and Rich Walker, Shadow Robot Company, UK, who is working on  a 4 degree-of-freedom biomorphic arm with air muscles.

Professor D G Caldwell, Italian Institute of Technology, Italy talked about the iCub – a robot inspired by children while Professor Huosheng Hu, University of Essex, UK warned of the Robot invasion.  Professor Uchikawa spoke of measuring electromagnetic signals generating from the human brain and its application to HAM while Professor Jeffrey Johnson from the OU discussed robot brains to design the future.

Professor Deng discussed System Control Engineering from the viewpoint of operator based nonlinear control and fault detection while Professor Robert M Parkin, Loughborough University, discussed Problem based learning for mechatronics and  Professor Lakmal Seneviratne, King's College London spoke about Intelligent mechatronic systems for environmental interactions.