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Welcome to my website! Thanks for visiting, and please come back as I keep updating the contents frequently. This website reflects my journey so far in this planet, my research life and overall vision.
It also directs you to different aspects of my scientific work, multidisciplinary projects I am involved in, articles, talks, reviews of recent readings and travels.
At different places you will find audiovisuals, demos on research works, downloadable articles, presentation and software!
Hope you find the stuff interesting and do send me any comments and suggestions!
Recent News
October 2024- Article in BBC covering our ongoing research and University of Essex website with a nice 2 min video of our 'first generation' robot working in the Tiptree farm (UK's first vertical growing system for soft fruits)- More updates coming soon on our second and third generation low-cost robots we are developing to deal with repetitive/labourious tasks that require high level of dexterity and interaction with the crop) !!
Game changing FruitTech for Productivity and Sustainability- Article from AgriTechE covering our research Read Here!
Delighted to kick start a new 3 year project 2024-27 called 'ABC' funded by DEFRA's flagship Farming Innovation Program. ABC stands for 'Adaptive, Biomimetic, Cost-Effective' robots for Smart Farming to transform how food is grown, how people work in such environments and make adva.nced agrirobotics technologies accessible to everyone! We have one research officer position avaialble now
Delighted to work on a new exciting 4 year Horizon Europe project ARISE (2024-28) that focuses on two crucial industrial sectors that can drive the European Green Deal progress 'Energy + Agriculture'. Checkout the new ARISE webpage for more details!
Nice video of the Innovate UK Transforming Food Production funded Versatile Project - robotic strawberry picking in 2023 season at -Tiptree watch video!
Delighted to receive 2023 Excellence in Education Award of University of Essex for the development of platform for showcasing final year UG Studnets' innovations through direct engagement with employers/industry. Picture from Awards ceremony!
KTP with Blackman and White on Adaptive motion control for Cutting machines has been rated as “outstanding” by Innovate UK’s national KTP grading panel and has generated a revenue of £1m so far! Read More
A snapshot of ongoing research projects
Agricultural Robotics- Harvesting Fruits of Robotic Labor!
Cobotics for Food Production Lines..
We are working on several projects in this critical area and targeting a range of crops (Soft Fruit, Wheat, Tomatoes, Bell Peppers, Mushroom, Lettuce) environments (Greenhouses, Vertical growing systems, Deepwater Pools) in collaboration with several growers Wilkin and Son's Tiptree Essex, JEPCO, NPL. The research is funded by Innovate UK (ISCF fortransforming food production UK-China) project Versatile (2021-24), EU H2020 SoftGrip (2021-23), several Industry funded projects on Crop Perception, Dexterous robotic manipulation/tool use for range of harvesting actions, Scouting with Drones and Mobile robots, Yield prediction.
The research looks at introducing robots in food production lines several of them hit by the pandemic and facing critical shortage of human labor to perform 'repetitive, laborious' tasks in extremely harsh (and freezing!) conditions. We are working on a) Designing novel 3D printed actuators for handling a range of deformable food materials, fruits, salads, vegetables, bread/paninis; b) Ingredient detection/localization c) Robotic Food Assembly d) Human-Robot and multirobot coordination production lines. Innovate UK funded SMART project looks at Robot Made Artisan Sandwiches in collaboration with Raynor Foods, KUKA and IRS.
Robotic Companions for Carehomes and Hospitals
Swift Cause-Effect learning and Common sense reasoning in Cognitive robots
Robot Episodic Memory - Connecting the dots of Experience....
In collaboration with Provide CIC and local hospitals at Essex, our research on robotic companions for care homes focusses on a) Swift learning of multimodal cognitive maps for new environments b) Human aware and goal directed navigation with a range of applications for commercial products c) Episodic memory for Proactive and user centric assistance d) Action perception and Intention detection e) Smart Robots for Smart Homes powered by IoT. More info
Reenacting playful experiments related to 'learning, reasoning, creativity' shown by animals on developmental robots, we are exploring cognitive architectures that will enable robots to 'act, interact, learn and reason' effectively in a complex world of objects, actions, causal relations, choices and People! More info
My work on bioinspired Robot episodic memory enables Cumulatively learning robots to effectively connect the dots between the remembered 'past' , the 'present context and the potential 'future' and hence plan goal oriented behaviors. Such memories are also partially transferable to other robots (as the video shows). More info here
Teaching Robotics @ University of Essex
CE101 YouTube Channel
Watch Now
The YouTube channel of my Module shows Amazing Robotics projects that First year students do at Essex..(another 40 projects videos to be added soon!!) Click to choose videos to play..
Challenge Week- Redefining first 5 days at the University!
Essex Challenge Week coordinated by me for last three years (2017-) won the 2018 Excellence in Education award of University of Essex! The vision is to give an 'Impossible is Nothing' experience to First years- During their first five days!! My presentation on what Challenge Week is about can be found here
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