On September 13-15, 2023 the Centre for Advanced Robotics @ Queen Mary University of London (ARQ) traveled to Cambridge, UK to present their research at TAROS 2023 - the UK oldest robotics and autonomous systems conference. ARQ was represented by multiple research papers and posters at TAROS 2023.

Gabriele Gudici's work was selected as one of the best paper finalists at the conference. Gabriele Giudici, a PhD-student, presented his work on remote object manipulation with the help of robotic hand with bioinspired tactile sensors and a novel human-machine interface based on virtual reality and touch feedback. Such systems are required for delicate telemanipulation of hazardous objects in materials in extreme environments. Gabriele's work builds on previous ARQ's projects EPSRC NCNR, MAN^3 and Q-Arena. The experiments were conducted in collaboration with Bukeikhan Omarali, Augusto Aramis Bonzini and co-supervised by Lorenzo Jamone, Ildar Farkhatdinov and Kaspar Althoefer.

Aaron Smiles, a DEng student co-supervised by Changjae Oh and Ildar Farkhatdinov, presented implementation of stereo vision based sensory system for underwater robots which provides a robot operator with natural images of the underwater scenes and distance measurements to the objects around the robot.

Eisa Anwar, a PhD student and a group of final year project students supervised by Ildar Farkhatdinov have presented their work on mechanical prototyping of a wearable robotic tail to support human posture during heavy material handling. Eisa has demonstrated the new prototype of the robot during the dedicated poster session.

Finally we are proud to report that our alumni, Dr Francesca Palermo got the 2nd place in the Best UK Robotics PhD thesis presented at TAROS 2023. Francesca's thesis explored novel ways to identify and characterise surface cracks with the help of computer vision and tactile sensing. A short video describing Francesca's work can be seen below. Francesca was co-supervised by Stefan Poslad and Ildar Farkhatdinov in collaboration wit Kaspar Althoefer. The best UK PhD thesis award was established by the Centre for Advanced Robotics at Queen Mary in 2018 and is led by Lorenzo Jamone.

Published research papers by ARQ at TAROS 2023:

• Giudici G, Omarali B, Bonzini AA, Althoefer K, Farkhatdinov I, Jamone L. Feeling good: Validation of bilateral tactile telemanipulation for a dexterous robot. In Annual Conference Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems 2023 Sep 8 (pp. 443-454). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.
• Smiles AL, Chavanakunakorn KD, Omarali B, Oh C, Farkhatdinov I. Implementation of a Stereo Vision System for a Mixed Reality Robot Teleoperation Simulator. In Annual Conference Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems 2023 Sep 8 (pp. 494-502). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.

Updated by: Ildar Farkhatdinov