Past Projects

We are developing an intelligent knee-ankle-foot robot, which is compact, modular, and portable, for stroke patients to carry out gait rehabilitation at outpatient and home settings. This robot was designed with a novel compact compliant force controllable actuator.

We developed a novel compliant actuator for rehabilitation robotics based on Series Elastic Actuator (SEA) design. Our design overcomes the key limitations faced by the current compliant actuator design, such as low force control fidelity and low high force control bandwidth.

This project is to answer to the call to solve a pressing need of the National Environment Agency (NEA), which is looking for robotics technology to reduce or replace manpower in drainage inspection.

This is project aims to develop robotic technologies for productivity improvement in industry. We develop a heavy duty omni-directional mobility platform that can carry manipulators and other tools to perform mobile tasks in the agile and flexible workspace.

Aging populations worldwide have resulted in increasing patient-numbers and reliance on elderly healthcare workers. There is a dire need to improve productivity in labor intensive areas through innovative technology. Inefficiency in hospitals include the daily transport of patients in bed which require two persons- one porter pushing behind and a nurse steering in front.

The objective of this project is to develop and demonstrate innovative enabling technologies to achieve automated landing, recharging, and launching of small vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) on a moving unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) under challenging real-world environments to perform reconnaissance, surveillance or search and rescue missions.

Conventional bio-inspired legged robots with rigid structures and stiff joints rely on complicated control strategies to adapting variable unknown environments. Most of them are so fragile that a minor collision may result in catastrophic damage.

Many physical biological properties can be used to improve bio-inspired robot design. In this project, we aim to investigate the effects of compliant and flexible trunks on improving the performance of legged robots.

Design Test Device SHAPE Memory Alloy (SMA), as an artificial muscle, can remember its original shape at a low temperature and return to the pre-deformed shape by heating. SMA actuators possess the advantage of mechanical simplicity, high power to weight ratio, small size and noiseless operation.

(A) The miniature zoom lens system (B) Positioning procedures Typical commercial off- the-shelf (COTS) zoom lens using conventional motor has limitation to further reduce its size & weight. COTS zoom lens with focal length of 50mm is usually large & heavy for small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV).

As with most small-sized air vehicles, a flapping wing MAV (FW-MAV) must be optimized for minimal weight and maximal lift. The components most responsible for weight are the actuators (motors and related components) and the power systems (batteries and related components).

Ultrasound image-guided liver biopsy has been a hot research topic for a long time. Due to the low-price and real-time imaging properties of ultrasound, this procedure has been widely applied in hospitals all over the world.

A family of hyperflexible instruments based on our novel biomimetic flexible design, which offer much higher dexterity and larger workspace with excellent controllability than existing flexible instruments. The mechanism comprises of a flexible backbone, a set of controlling tendons and a constraint.