About the Editors

Editor-in-Chief

Guido de Croon, PhD

 

TU Delft
Delft, The Netherlands

His research interest lies with computationally efficient, bio-inspired algorithms for autonomous robots. Specific topics include swarming of tiny drones, optic flow control, self-supervised learning, and neuromorphic sensing and processing. Example results include the 20-gram fully autonomous flapping wing robot DelFly Explorer, a swarm of tiny drones exploring unknown environments, and a new theory on how flying robots and insects can gauge distances with optic flow control.

Managing Editor

Ronghua Guo, PhD





Ronghua obtained her PhD degree in Geology from Nanjing University in 2021. During her PhD, she focused on the sedimentary provenance analysis with different detrital heavy minerals from modern river sands in the South Tibetan Plateau. She joined Springer Nature as an Editorial Submission Advisor in October 2021 and now serves as a Managing Editor for 4 titles in the npj Series. She is now based in the Springer Nature Nanjing office.

Associate Editors

Chiara Bartolozzi, PhD

Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia
Genova, Italy
 

Chiara's research goal is to apply the "neuromorphic" engineering approach to the design of robotic platforms as enabling technology towards the design of autonomous machines. This goal is pursued by inducing a paradigm shift in robotics, based on the emerging concept of Event-Driven (ED) sensing and processing. Similarly to their biological counterpart, and differently from traditional robotic sensors, ED sensory systems sample their input signal at fixed (and relative) amplitude changes, intrinsically adapting to the dynamics of the sensory signal: temporal resolution is extremely high for fast transitory signals and decreases for slower inputs. This approach naturally leads to better robots that acquire, transmit and process information only when needed, optimising the use of resources, leading to real-time, low-cost, operation.

Sawyer B. Fuller, PhD

University of Washington
Seattle, WA, USA
 

Sawyer directs the University of Washington Autonomous Insect Robotics Lab, which aims to advance our understanding of how we can create self-contained, fully autonomous robots the size of insects. Areas of focus include the control, sensor systems, control, and power systems of insect-sized aerial robots. Many technologies that are successful in larger robots cannot be reduced to insect scale because different effects begin to dominate the governing physics. This leads to "phase transitions" in which a different approach becomes favorable. For example, small animals like flies and hummingbirds flap their wings continuously rather than gliding. The group frequently takes inspiration from biology to find technological solutions. From unsteady control of fluid mechanics to intelligence built into mechanics to robust and adaptive control to olfaction, biology still outclasses current robots. Future insect robotics will not only be small and efficient, but capable of carrying out sophisticated tasks in uncertain and complex environments.

Jens Kober, PhD

TU Delft
Delft, The Netherlands


Jens Kober is an associate professor at the TU Delft, Netherlands. He worked as a postdoctoral scholar jointly at the CoR-Lab, Bielefeld University, Germany and at the Honda Research Institute Europe, Germany. He graduated in 2012 with a PhD Degree in Engineering from TU Darmstadt and the MPI for Intelligent Systems. For his research he received the annually awarded Georges Giralt PhD Award for the best PhD thesis in robotics in Europe, the 2018 IEEE RAS Early Academic Career Award, and has received an ERC Starting grant. His research interests include motor skill learning, (deep) reinforcement learning, imitation learning, interactive learning, and machine learning for control.

Yong-Lae Park, PhD

Seoul National University
Seoul, South Korea

 

Prof. Yong-Lae Park received the Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA, in 2010, and is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Seoul National University (SNU), Seoul, Korea. Prior to joining SNU, he was an Assistant Professor in the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA (2013-2017) and a Technology Development Fellow in the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA (2010 to 2013). His research interests include soft artificial skin sensors and muscle actuators, soft robotics, wearable robotics, biomedical and rehabilitation robotics, and novel manufacturing technologies for soft smart materials and structures.
 

Nitin Sanket, PhD

Worcester Polytechnic Intitute
Worcester, MA, USA
 

Nitin's interests like in building algorithmic frameworks for enabling autonomy on resource constrained small mobile robots. He builds computational models to embrace the perception and action synergies to solve robotics problems in a bio-inspired manner. Enabling autonomy at scales not thought possible before is done through active perception, interactive perception and passive computation.
 

Editorial Board Members

John Aloimonos, Computer Science Department, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA
Pakpong Chirarattananon, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China
Agoston E. Eiben, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Mirko Kovac, Imperial College London, London, UK and Swiss Federal Laboratories of Material Science and Technology, Zurich, Switzerland
Jean-Baptiste Mouret, Inria Nancy - Grand Est / LORIA, Nancy, France
Hoon Cheol Park, Konkuk University, Seoul, South Korea
Barbara Webb, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK  
 

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