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.
Nuria Pena Perez and Joshua Brown graduated with Ph.D. in computer science in 2023, both conducted their research at the Centre for Advanced Robotics.
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. During her studies at Queen Mary, Nuria got multiple research awards, including 'Best Paper' finalist at IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Robotics and IEEE Biomedical Robotics and Biomechatronics. Nuria’s research findings describe how therapy tasks for robot-mediated neurorehabilitation can be designed to improve their efficiency.
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. As a doctoral student, Joshua was awarded a UK-Canada travel award that allowed him to successfully validated the developed haptic system for remote controlling underwater robots at York University, Canada.
The award to Joshua and Nuria was presented at the Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems 2024 conference (TAROS 2024) - the UK’s longest-running international robotics conference. The UK's Best Ph.D. thesis in robotics award has been running since 2017 and was initiated by the Centre for Advanced Robotics at Queen Mary University of London to promote UK robotics research and education. Thesis evaluation is conducted by world-leading academics representing overseas institutions.
Dr Nuria Pena Perez was co-supervised by Dr Ildar Farkhatdinov and Dr Laurissa Tokarchuk (Queen Mary) and Professor Etienne Burdet (Imperial College London), she is now a postdoctoral researcher at RWTH Aachen, German.
Dr Joshua Brown was supervised by Dr Ildar Farkhatdinov and Professor Michael Jenkin (York University, Canada) and is now a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College London.
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