Jonathan Rossiter

Soft robotics is the research and development of novel compliant technologies for robotic systems, medical applications and engineering. These include core technologies such as smart materials and artificial muscles, smart mechanisms and structures, autonomous soft robots, smart skins and tactile interaction devices.

My wider research interests also include bio-mimetics, artificial intelligence, composites, sensors and the wider robotics field. Bio-mimetics is an engineering tool that covers a huge scale from the tangible nano-technology level, including materials, actuators and sensors, right up to the intangible level of artificial intelligence, including high-level perception, cognition and reasoning.

In the field of artificial intelligence I focus on high-level intelligence and especially human-like reasoning with uncertainty.

In the wider, non-soft robotics domain I have been working on autonomous intelligence, especially in human-like driver robots, and intelligent robot sensing and actuation.

My research on sensing extends from tactile sensing techniques to human-like visual sensing and perception and human assist paradigms including the projection of one sense (such as vision or balance) to another sense (such as touch).

In my robotic actuator and artificial muscle research I have been developing new polymer-composite actuators involving principles of buckling and bi-stability and robots which are inspired by bio-mimetic study of swimming organisms, including bacteria and fish.

Other research interests include: humanist computing, object oriented knowledge representation and programming, reasoning under uncertainty, computer vision, medical applications of AI, natural descriptors of knowledge, computing with words, human-machine interaction, bio-informatics and bio-mimetics.