Abstract
The city and living quality have been significantly affected by the ageing workforce and the shortage of labour, particularly for tasks that are dangerous or under harsh working conditions. In this presentation, various types of cable-driven robots and real-life applications related to building construction, utilities maintenance, and human assistive devices are introduced. Different robot types include reconfigurable mechanisms, underactuated suspended systems and flexible robots. Example applications include robots for brick construction work, building inspection, wearable assistive devices to augment human capabilities and robots to physical touch to comfort people. To realise these challenging applications, advances in topics related to mechanism design, kinematics, dynamics, workspace analysis, control and intelligence will be presented to allow these robots to operate within complex environments and settings.
Bio
Dr. Darwin Tat Ming LAU received his B. Eng (1st Hons) and B.CS degrees from the University of Melbourne, Australia, in 2008. He received his Ph.D. degree in the area of robotics in 2014 from the University of Melbourne, Australia. From 2014 to 2015, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute of Intelligent Systems and Robotics, University Pierre and Marie Curie, Paris, France. He joined the Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), in October 2015 and is currently an Associate Professor. His research focuses on topics in robot manipulation, particularly related to kinematic and dynamic analysis, design, optimisation and control of novel mechanisms, and human-robot teleoperation, including cable-driven parallel robots and bio-inspired robots. In addition to fundamental research, Dr. LAU also has great interest in the application of novel mechanisms to impactful real-world applications, including building construction (such as robotic brick laying, facade cleaning, painting, foundation works and facade inspection), musculoskeletal robots and wearable assistive devices. Noticeable awards received by Dr. LAU include the 2014 University of Melbourne Chancellor’s Prize for Excellence in the Ph.D. Thesis, 2019 CUHK University Education Award (Early Career Faculty Member) and 2019 University Grants Council Teaching Award (Early Career Faculty Member), and 2022 Young Innovator Award at Hong Kong Construction Industry Council Construction Innovation Award.
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