Two guest researchers for robotics
More accurate, more efficient, safer
- 02.01.2025
Whether in medicine or industry, robotic systems have become indispensable. The goal of Prof. Dr. Benliang Zhu and Dr. Qizhi Meng is to make them better and better. The Chinese engineers are currently Humboldt Foundation research fellows and have chosen the chair of Prof. Dr. Andrés Kecskeméthy. They both say that he is one of the leading international scientists in his field of mechanics and robotics.
Dr. Qizhi Meng: His research interests are high-performance parallel robotic mechanisms. His research topic is “Deployable Mechanisms for Innovative Medical Robots – From Type Synthesis to Final Design and Motion/force Control.”
The aim is to design increasingly powerful surgical robots that cause fewer wounds and smaller wound areas. “The challenge in the development work is that these robots must fold when entering the human body and maintain a small storage space. Inside the body, on the other hand, they must be able to expand to provide a large flexible workspace,” says Dr. Meng.
Dr. Meng has received multiple awards for his work. He earned his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Tsinghua University, China, in 2021 and subsequently worked there as a research fellow, followed by a research stay at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and the Institute of Science Tokyo.
Prof. Dr. Benliang Zhu: His research focuses on “Skeleton-reinforced pneumatic soft actuators using explicit topology optimization”. This involves high-end technologies for soft robotics. These have a rigid internal structure and a soft flexible shell. This allows them to adapt to their environment while precisely executing movements such as bending, twisting and stretching. Zhu is developing flexible structures for these devices for various application scenarios, as well as the components (actuators) that are driven by pneumatic systems, and the necessary computational methods.
Prof. Zhu (b. 1986) received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at the South China University of Technology in Guangzhou, China, in 2014. He is currently a full professor there. His research interests include soft robotics, compliant mechanisms, precision positioning techniques and micro/nanoscale manipulation.
Picture:
Prof. Dr. Benliang Zhu (l.) and Dr. Qizhi Meng (r.).