Two PhD students from the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary University, Nuria Pena Perez and Joshua Brown, have achieved joint 2nd place in the 2023 Best UK PhD Thesis in Robotics competition.
The award was presented at the Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems 2024 conference (TAROS), held at Brunel University London, this August.
TAROS is the UK’s longest-running international robotics conference and a major platform for senior researchers and research students to present their latest work in autonomous systems, human-robot interaction, soft robotics, and more, to the scientific community.
Nuria's PhD thesis, funded by the Centre for Doctoral Training in Intelligent Games & Game Intelligence, focused on the relationship between robotics and gamified human-computer interfaces in bi-manual neuro-motor rehabilitation. With the help of robotic interaction interfaces, she explored coordinated hand movements and muscular activations in human-participants during target tracking tasks shown on a computer screen.
Joshua's doctoral research, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, pioneered novel touch interaction (haptics) interfaces that combine particle jamming phenomena with vibrotactile stimulation. He developed two haptic devices, a joystick and a touchpad, which were tested in haptic rendering and remote underwater robot teleoperation scenarios.
Nuria is now a postdoctoral researcher at RWTH Aachen, Germany, and Joshua is a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College London.
To find out more about our Postgraduate programmes at QMUL, explore here.