Invited Speakers

Kensuke Harada (Fellow, IEEE) received the B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering from Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan, in 1992, 1994, and 1997, respectively. From 1997 to 2002, he was a Research Associate at Hiroshima University, Hiroshima, Japan. Since 2002, he has been with the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST). From 2005 to 2006, he was a Visiting Scholar with the Department of Computer Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA, and the Leader of the Manipulation Research Group, AIST, from 2013 to 2015. He is currently a Professor at the Graduate School of Engineering Science, Osaka University, Toyonaka, Japan. His research interests include mechanics and control of robot manipulators and robot hands, biped locomotion, and motion planning of robotic systems.

Takayoshi Yamada is a Professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, at Gifu University. He received his B.E., M.E, and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the Nagoya Institute of Technology (NIT), Japan, in 1991, 1993, and 1995, respectively. He was a research associate and an Assistant Professor at NIT from 1995 to 2008 and an Associate Professor at Gifu University from 2008 to 2016. He is a member of IEEE, the Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers (JSME), the Robotics Society of Japan (RSJ), the Society of Instrument and Control Engineers (SICE), and the Japan Society of Precision Engineering (JSPE). His research interests include grasping, manipulation, sensing, and automation systems.

Yu Sun received the BS and MS degrees in electrical engineering from the Dalian University of Technology, in 1997 and 2000, respectively, and the PhD degree in computer science from the University of Utah, in 2007. He is an associate professor with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, at the University of South Florida. He is an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics. He was a postdoctoral associate with Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL), Cambridge, Massachusetts, from Dec. 2007 to May 2008. His research interests include intelligent systems, robotics, virtual reality, and medical applications. He is a senior member of the IEEE.

Mehmet Dogar is an Associate Professor at the School of Computing, University of Leeds, UK. His research focuses on planning and control for robotic object manipulation. He is an Associate Editor for the International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR) and for the IEEE Transactions on Robotics. Recently, he was a Visiting Professor at ETH Zurich (2023). He joined Leeds in 2015. Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at MIT (2013-2015). He received his PhD from the Carnegie Mellon University (2008-2013).

Jeff Ichnowski is an assistant professor at CMU’s Robotics Institute, where he runs the Momentum Robotics Lab. He was a postdoc at UC Berkeley’s Sky Computing (formerly RISE lab), AUTOLAB, and BAIR, advised by Profs. Ken Goldberg and Ion Stoica. Before returning to academia, he was the principal architect at one of the world’s largest cloud-based software-as-a-service companies. His research explores robot algorithms and systems for high-speed motion, task, and manipulation planning, using cloud-based high-performance computing, optimization, and deep learning.

Ken Goldberg is an inventor working at the intersection of art, robotics, and social media. At UC Berkeley, Ken teaches and supervises research in Robotics, Automation, and New Media. Ken holds dual degrees in Electrical Engineering and Economics from the University of Pennsylvania (1984) and MS and PhD degrees from Carnegie Mellon University (1990). He joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1995, where he is Craigslist Distinguished Professor of New Media. He is a Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, with secondary appointments in Electrical Engineering/Computer Science and the School of Information. Ken also holds an appointment in the UC San Francisco Medical School where he pursues research in medical robotics.

Ken has published over 300 peer-reviewed technical papers on algorithms for robotics, automation, and social information filtering; his inventions have been awarded nine US Patents. He is co-founder and past Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (T-ASE), Co-Founder of the Berkeley Center for New Media, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist of Ambidextrous Robotics, Co-Founder of the Moxie Institute, and Founding Director of UC Berkeley's Art, Technology, and Culture Lecture Series.

Jeannette Bohg is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. She was a group leader at the Autonomous Motion Department (AMD) of the MPI for Intelligent Systems until September 2017. Before joining AMD in January 2012, Jeannette Bohg was a PhD student at the Division of Robotics, Perception and Learning (RPL) at KTH in Stockholm. In her thesis, she proposed novel methods towards multi-modal scene understanding for robotic grasping. She also studied at Chalmers in Gothenburg and at the Technical University in Dresden where she received her Master in Art and Technology and her Diploma in Computer Science, respectively. Her research focuses on perception and learning for autonomous robotic manipulation and grasping. She is specifically interested in developing methods that are goal-directed, real-time, and multi-modal such that they can provide meaningful feedback for execution and learning. Jeannette Bohg has received several Early Career and Best Paper awards, most notably the 2019 IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Career Award and the 2020 Robotics: Science and Systems Early Career Award.

Kyu Jin Cho is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and the Director of the Soft Robotics Research Center and Biorobotics Lab at Seoul National University. He received his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from MIT and his B.S. and M.S. from Seoul National University. He was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory before joining SNU in 2008. He has been exploring novel soft bio-inspired robot designs, including a water jumping robot, soft morphing robots, soft grippers, and soft wearable robots for the disabled. He has received the 2014 IEEE RAS Early Academic Career Award for his fundamental contributions to soft robotics and biologically inspired robot design, and many other awards, including the 2022 SNU Most Distinguished Researcher award. He has published a Science paper on water jumping robots and several papers in Science Robotics with novel robot designs. He served RAS as associate VP of the Publication Activities Board for six years and is currently serving RAS as Vice President of the Technical Activities Board.

Zhongkui Wang (Member, IEEE) received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in mechanical engineering from Northeast Forestry University, Harbin, China, in 2000 and 2003 respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in robotics from Ritsumeikan University, Kusatsu, Japan, in 2011. From 2011 to 2012 and from 2012 to 2014, he was a Research Associate and a postdoctoral fellow, respectively, with Ritsumeikan University. During his Postdoc, he visited ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, for six months as a Guest Researcher. From 2014 to 2019, he was an Assistant Professor at Ritsumeikan University, where he has been an Associate Professor since 2019. His research interests mainly include soft robotics, biomedical engineering, and tactile sensing. Dr. Wang was the recipient of the Best Paper Award on Robotics at the 2018 IEEE International Conference on Real-time Computing and Robotics, and the Best Paper Award at IEEE 24th International Conference on Mechatronics and Machine Vision in Practice. He is an Associate Editor for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters and an Editorial Board Member of the Chinese Journal of Mechanical Engineering.

Nancy Pollard is a Professor at the Robotics Institute and the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. She received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1994, where she performed research on grasp planning for dexterous robot hands. She received the NSF CAREER award for research on “Quantifying Humanlike Enveloping Grasps” and the Okawa Research Grant for “Studies of Dexterity for Computer Graphics and Robotics.” She founded the course “Hands: Design and Control for Dexterous Manipulation,” at Carnegie Mellon and has been teaching this course since 2010. Her research goal is to understand human dexterity and create dexterous behavior in robots. She has led the development of several generations of dexterous soft robotic hands and leads the CMU Foam Hands Laboratory.