Lab Tours

Meeting location: Faculty of Engineering, Torrington Place, London WC1E 7JE

Time slots:  

Monday, May 29: 09.00 -12.00 and 14.00 -17.00 

Friday, June 2: 09.00 -12.00 and 14.00 -17.00

1) Soft Haptics & Robotics lab - https://helge-wurdemann.com/softhapticslab

Tour description:

This tour will give an overview of soft material haptic and robotic systems emerging from the UCL Soft Haptics and Robotics Lab. Demonstrations will include prototypes that have the ability to change their shape and compliance on demand bridging the gap between traditional rigid and entirely soft robots. The team creates and embeds innovative stiffness-controllable mechanisms as well as combines advanced Artificial Intelligence with control strategies in these robotic prototypes. Applications include minimally invasive interventions, transport, and manufacturing.

2) Field Robotics and Learning Lab

Tour description:

This lab visit will showcase the most recent research about advanced marine autonomy at UCL MechEng. The visit will include a demonstration of 1) stability control of autonomous underwater vehicles under varying sea state conditions, 2) surveying of underwater structures, 3) cooperative control of multi-agent systems, and etc.

3) Bioinspired adaptable robotics lab

Tour description:

The Bioinspired Adaptable Robotics Lab is focussed on using nature as inspiration to develop robotic devices that using their embodiment, morphology, and compliance they adapt to their changing environment. This tour will showcase the bioinspired devices that we have developed and comprise these characteristics.

Meeting location: University College London, Charles Bell House, 43-45 Foley St., Fitzrovia, London W1W 7TY

Time slots:    

Monday, May 29: 10.00 -12.00 and 14.00 -16.00 

Wellcome/EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Sciences

WEISS intro video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=splOsfdMFK0&embeds_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ucl.ac.uk%2F&source_ve_path=MjM4NTE&feature=emb_title

WEISS website: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/interventional-surgical-sciences/

Tour description: 

The Wellcome / EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Sciences (WEISS) at UCL focuses on the development of intuitive and highly personalised surgical platform that enables more precise, less invasive procedures. By combining the strength of engineering and clinical sciences, UCL WEISS aims to ensure that innovative engineering solutions are reaching the clinic to benefit patients.

The research is being developed with a wide range of clinical applications in mind, including vascular, paediatric, ophthalmic, neurological and prostate surgical interventions.

The attendees will have the chance to visit the robotic labs, the mock OR and the mechatronic labs with demos being also presented on the ground floor of the centre including research on intraoperative imaging and sensing, data fusion and extraction, human-technology interfaces, tissue modelling, interventional instrumentation and surgical navigation.

Meeting location: Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London E20 3BS (15 -20 min walking from UCL East) 

Time slots:   

Friday, June 2: 09.00 -12.00 and 14.00 -17.00 

Website: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-east/study-and-research/robotics-and-autonomous-systems

Tour description:  

UCL HereEast interdisciplinary robotics research laboratories spans Architecture, Computing Science and Engineering with targeting research in fabrication, construction, sustainable materials, surgery and metrology. Activities include bio-inspired structure creation, swarm and aerial robotic control, large volume fabrication, metrology for aerospace manufacture, surgical end-effector development and teleoperation. Robots range from industrial Kuka, Staubli and OCRbotics systems, through ABB and IWJA cobots to scratch built drone systems.

UCL East Robotics is part of the Computer Science department, and the research topics include Legged and Wheeled Robotics, Robotic Manipulation, Medical Robotics, as well as Soft and Swarm Robotics. In this tour, we aim at providing insights of our research in Robotics and AI, demonstrating some of those on our robots, that include the Franka Emika Panda arm and SPOT/ANYmal quadrupeds.

Meeting location: Queen Mary University of London, London E1 4NS (5 -8 min walking from Stepney Green or Mile End Underground station) 

Time slots: 

Monday, 29th May: 09.00 -12.00 and 14.00 -17.00 

Website: https://www.robotics.qmul.ac.uk/about/

Tour description:  

The Centre for Advanced Robotics @ Queen Mary (ARQ) is a cross-faculty multidisciplinary research centre located in Mile End Campus, Queen Mary University of London, a Russell Group research-intensive university whose Engineering ranked 2nd in the UK for its quality of research outputs in the REF2021 exercise. 

ARQ’s research areas span robot design and mechatronics, human-robot interaction, control and systems engineering, autonomous systems, field robotics, and sensing and biomedical mechatronics. In this tour, we aim to provide exciting demonstrations of robotic systems developed by ARQ researchers in collaboration with colleagues across the world.

Meeting location: Imperial College London, White City Campus 

Time slots: 

Friday, June 2, 09.00 - 12.00 

Friday, June 2, 14.00 - 17.00 

Website: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/human-robotics/

Tour description:  

The objectives of the Human Interfacing and Augmentation Center are to: 

• develop disruptive approaches for interaction, restoration and augmentation 
• create the science and technology of sensorimotor interfaces 
• translate advances to daily living technology 

The tour will showcase some of the robotic and neural interfaces we have developed to investigate human motor control and develop medical and industrial applications, including https://www.imperial.ac.uk/human-robotics/dr-octopus-/ 

Meeting location: Imperial College London, South Kensington Campus, London SW7 2AZ, UK  

Time slots:  ​​​​​

Friday, June 2, 14.00 -17.00 

Website: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/aerial-robotics/

Tour description:  

The Aerial Robotics Lab (ARL) is a world-leading group with research focuses on the development of novel, biologically inspired flying robots for distributed sensing in air and water and autonomous robotic construction for digital infrastructure systems for industry 5.0 applications. On the tour, visitors will have an opportunity to visit Brahmal Vasudevan Multi Terrain Aerial Robotics Arena. The arena is the first of its kind in Europe, enabling engineers to test the next generation of aerial robotics for urban environments and extreme conditions. In the tour, we will also show different aerial robots for ecological data collection, infrastructure inspection, and flying in challenging environments that are designed and developed at ARL.

Any specific tour requirements: 

Visitor should not wear open-toe or high-heel shoes while visiting the lab. If visitor has symptoms of flu or COVID, he/she should refrain from joining the lab tour or would be required to put on face covering upon the request by ARL.  

Meeting location: Imperial College London, South Kensington Campus, London SW7 2AZ, UK  

Venue: Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Dyson School of Design Engineering, Imperial College Road, South Kensington, London, SW7 2DB 

Time slots:

Monday, May 29, 09:00-11:00

Website: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/morph-lab/

Tour description:  

In the Morph Lab, we try to understand the principles behind real-time tuning of the physical body to improve both perception and action. Since it is difficult to disentangle parallel pathways of motor commands in a living being, we take a soft robotics approach to test questions to do with embodied intelligence.

The tour will showcase and demonstrate ongoing projects in the Morph Lab including a bio-inspired deformable mobile robot (DeforMoBot), amoeba-inspired granular rearrangement as an embodied adaptation strategy, compliant leg design for quadruped robots for soft landing and improved gripping (Natural Intelligence project), a tapered whisker-based reservoir computing system for mobile robot terrain identification, an origami-inspired endoscopy capsule which can passively anterograde or retrograde through intestinal peristalsis, and a passive knee exoskeleton with angle dependent variable stiffness.

Meeting location: King's College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS

Time slots: 

Monday, 29th May: 09.00 -12.00 and 14.00 -17.00 

Website: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/core

Tour description:

Step into the world of cutting-edge robotics at the Centre for Robotics Research (CORE), a renowned multidisciplinary research group based at the Department of Engineering. Our team of experts is dedicated to solving some of the most pressing societal challenges using innovative robot-centric approaches. During your visit to our state-of-the-art facility located at King’s Strand Campus, you'll get a glimpse into the future of robotics and witness firsthand our groundbreaking research in action. Explore our demos showcasing innovative tactile sensing and manipulation technologies, robot skill learning, soft robots, flexible metamorphic platforms, and the seamless integration of robots and humans.

Meeting location: Main Entrance of St Thomas’ Hospital

Time slots:  

Monday, 29th May: 09.00 -12.00 and 14.00 -17.00 

Website: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/bmeis/our-departments/surgical-interventional-engineering

Tour description:

With a strong focus on surgical robots and robotic technologies, the Department of Surgical & Interventional Engineering (SIE) within the KCL School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences provides a collaborative environment for clinical and engineering professionals to create innovative surgical and interventional devices that cater to a broad range of clinical needs.

As part of the tour the attendees will get the chance to visit the SIE Facility which is located in the heart of St Thomas’ Hospital. We will demonstrate its hardware development and fabrication facilities, the SIE Validation Suite with its state-of-the-art simulated operating theatre as well as adjacent laboratories. Demos will be provided for our work on robot-assisted ultrasound scanning, concentric tube and soft robots as well as catheter robotic systems.

Meeting location: Oxford Robotics Institute, The George Building, 23 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN

Time slots:

Friday, 2nd June: 13:00-16:30

If you are interested in this tour please register interest by contacting ketao.zhang@qmul.ac.uk. Please note that all attendees must make their own way to Oxford. We recommend travelling by train from London Paddington, ORI volunteers will guide you from the station to the lab.

Website: https://ori.ox.ac.uk/ 

Tour description:

Based within the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford, the Oxford Robotics Institute (ORI) is a federation of seven research groups which span the breadth of research into autonomous robotics. Founded in 2017 with an initial focus on mobile robotics and machine learning, the ORI has grown to include over 100 people with interests from soft robotics and control for dynamic robots; through perception, localisation, and mission planning; to trustworthy cognitive systems and AI for general embodied intelligence.

In this tour you will visit our lab space and see robot demonstrations from across the Institute, including legged autonomy, inspection missions, soft robots, service robots, and AI-driven capabilities for physical interaction.