It is a great honor that Professor Yang Liu has been invited to the editorial board of Nonlinear Dynamics, an International Journal of Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos in Engineering Systems. He will act as an Subject Editor to handle the manuscripts in Robotics and Control.

We are very happy to host Prof. Kevin Chen from MIT on 5 June 2023. He gave Engineering Department a keynote talk on his recent research work – “Agile, robust, and multifunctional micro-aerial-robots powered by soft artificial muscles”.

It is a great pleasure to welcome Dr Yahui Sun, who will start a 24-month Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowship entitled “AGENT: Targeting high efficient energy harvesting via controlling multistability” in the Exeter Small-Scale Robotics Laboratory at the University of Exeter from October 2023.

Funded by UKRI (€236,748), AGENT seeks to explore a frontier research area in applied dynamics and control to improve the performance of energy harvesting through implementing a novel minimal energy control. The fellow will use for the first time the system’s basins of attraction for minimum energy control, aiming to improve the efficiency of energy harvesting that can be potentially equpped for small-scale robots. In the long term, this fellowship will be fundamental for the realisation of energy efficient control, which will provide safe, reliable, and efficient operations for future energy harvesting systems at small scale. This fellowship will be hosted by Prof. Yang Liu from the University of Exeter with the secondment supervisor, Prof. Przemyslaw Perlikowski from the Lodz University of Technology.

It is a great pleasure to welcome Dr Gengxiang Wang, who will start a 24-month Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowship entitled “WORMS: When micro-robots encounter metastatic cancer in the adjacent capillaries” in the Exeter Small-Scale Robotics Laboratory at the University of Exeter from October 2023.

Funded by UKRI (€236,748), WORMS seeks to develop a new mathematical tool for analysing the sensing capability of micro-robots based on the flexible multibody system and fluid mechanics, to aid the detection of hard-to-visualise cancer metastasis in the adjacent capillaries of the primary bowel cancer site. This work attempts to initiate a new modality for metastatic cancer diagnosis, delivering an efficient, minimally invasive procedure for early cancer patients. The unique research approach of this fellowship, a joint effort of numerical and experimental studies, will be hosted by Prof. Yang Liu from the University of Exeter with the secondment supervisor, Prof. Antoine Ferreira from INSA Centre Val de Loire, and the consulting gastroenterologist, Dr Shyam Prasad, from the Royal Devon University Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust.

Prof. Liu has been awarded £44,857 by the Medical Research Council (Impact Acceleration Account) as PI for preclinical assessment of a vibrational device for early bowel cancer diagnosis. This grant will allow the knowledge exchange fellow, Dr Kenneth Afebu (a postdoctoral research fellow of Prof. Liu’s team) to work with the Royal Devon University Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust for nine months to de-risk the technology of AI-assisted capsule (see figure below) and create a clear road map for future development.

Conceptual design and real-world prototype of the vibrational capsule system for early bowel cancer detection (Picture source: IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 8, no. 4, pp. 2341-2348, April 2023).

We are very happy to announce that on 20 February Jiajia Zhang passed her PhD viva, subject to minor corrections.

Her thesis is entitled “Prototype design and testing of a self-propelled vibro-impact capsule system for lower gastrointestinal endoscopies”. Her PhD was supervised by Prof. Yang Liu, Prof. Dibin Zhu (Shanghai Jiao Tong University) and Prof. Shyam Prasad (Royal Devon University Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust).

Many thanks to her examiners: Prof. Daniil Yurchenko from the University of Southampton, Dr Dong Wang (internal examiner) and Dr Evangelos Papatheou (non-examining independent examiner).

We are very delighted to organise a Symposium on Biomechanics and Small-Scale Robots at the 3rd International Nonlinear Dynamics Conference (https://nodycon.org/2023/) to be held in Rome, Italy in 18-22 June 2023. Our symposium aims to provide a forum for researchers to present, discuss and disseminate recent advances in developing small-scale robots, and the scope of this symposium includes, but is not limited to the following areas:

·        Dynamics and control of small-scale robots
·        Soft miniature robots
·        Swarm of micro/nanorobots and collective behaviours
·        Bio-inspired design of micro/nano-scale robots
·        Mechatronics systems for small-scale robots
·        Sensing and monitoring at small scale
·        Actuation of miniature robots
·        Autonomous robotics at small scale
·        Biomechanics of medical robotics
·        Mechanics of soft robotic devices

We would like to cordially invite you to submit your latest work in this symposium!!!

Many congratulations to Dr Yang Liu who was promoted from Senior Lecturer to Associate Professor on 5 July 2022.

Huge congratulations to Dr Zhi Zhang and Dr Kenneth Afebu who attended their PhD graduation ceremony with their PhD supervisor, Dr Yang Liu, on 14 July 2022 at Great Hall, University of Exeter.

PhD student, Jiajia Zhang, presented out new design “A pill sized robot that can drive inside large intestines” at the 39th IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA2022) in Philadelphia, USA.