While mimicking biological principles does not necessarily lead to the development of optimal systems it is believed that the merging of multiple, diverse technologies will facilitate a transition from traditional (hard-bodied) robots towards a new generation of hybrid systems combining engineering principles such as speed, robustness, accuracy, and endurance with biologically inspired concepts that aim to emulate the 'softer' compliant structure of muscle, bone, tendons and skin to provide robots with the capacity for self-repair, regeneration, redundancy etc..
Within the department the research activities are arranged in terms of:
- core scientific/technological research aimed at providing fundamental competences needed to develop robotic and humanoid technology
- advanced research demonstrators that provided large focused research projects that integrate the core sciences
Within the scientific research there are activities based on:
- Actuation and Power Systems
- Haptic, and Interaction Technologies
- Humanoids
- Learning and interaction
- Locomotion
- Biomedical Robotics
- Virtual Reality
