Prof. Yen-Lin Han
Seattle University, USA

Dr. Yen-Lin Han, Professor and Chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Seattle University, Seattle, WA, USA, received her BS degree in Materials Science and Engineering from National Tsing-Hua University in Hsinchu, Taiwan, her PhD degree in Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering and her MS degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA. Her current research interest focuses on soft robotics in medical devices, for which she received the US National Science Foundation (NSF) Mid-CAREER Advancement (MCA) award in 2023. She holds four US patents and has nine pending patents filed by PACCAR on autonomous vehicles since 2018. She is a passionate Engineering Educator and experienced in developing high-impact pedagogical practices. She was the Co-PI for the NSF Revolutionizing Engineering and Computer Science Departments grant awarded to the Mechanical Engineering department at Seattle University to study how the department culture changes can foster students' engineering identity with the long-term goal of increasing the representation of women and minorities in the field of engineering.

 

Prof. Kamilo Melo,
KM-RoBoTa, Switzerland

Kamilo Melo is a Colombian Engineer and Scientist, and current CEO of KM-RoBoTa, a Swiss robotics company that design advanced animal-robotics systems. He completed a bachelor in Electrical Engineering and a Master in Science in Mechanical Engineering in Colombia, which led to a PhD in Robotics completed with a visiting position in the "Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique", of the Sorbonne University in Paris, France. After his studies, he held several academic research positions: in the advanced robotics group at the Italian Institute of Technology and University of Pisa, and later, at the Biorobotics Laboratory of EPFL in Lausanne, Swtizerland. His work has been published in several high impact articles, which include fundamental science, applied research and industrial developments. His company leads the international market of animal-like robots that are informed from biology and properly designed to meet world class research requirements as many of his robots have appear in important journal covers like Science Robotics and Nature.

 

Reader. Matthew Howard,
King's College London, UK

Dr Matthew Howard is a Reader in Engineering at the Centre for Robotics Research, Department of Engineering, King's College London, and CEO and Co-founder of the Weird Gripper Company Ltd. Prior to joining King's in 2013, he held a Japan Society for Promotion of Science fellowship at the Department of Mechanoinformatics at the University of Tokyo and was a research fellow at the University of Edinburgh from 2009-2012. He also obtained his PhD in 2009 at Edinburgh with an EPSRC CASE award sponsored by Honda Research. His research interests span the fields of robotics and autonomous systems, statistical machine learning and adaptive control. His work focuses on all aspects robotic skill learning and efficient programming by demonstration for (soft) robotic devices, driven by analysis of human musculoskeletal control. This spans the development pipeline from sensors for human motion capture, algorithms for machine learning, control approaches, and mechatronic design of robotic devices. He has worked with a number of large growers of fresh produce sponsored by the AHDB, looking at automation through collaborative robotics in industrial agriculture and horticulture, recently authored the UK-RAS white paper on training the agrifood workforce to be RAS-ready and is currently commercialising a new gripping device for handling complex, tangle-prone materials. He is Associate Vice President for the IEEE/RAS Member Activities Board.