Deep Time validated Soft Robot Agility

Connect soft robotics with mechanical intelligence and bioinspired control strategy to deliver solutions that ultimately surpass animal-level agility.

Rather than treating morphology as passive hardware, our work asks how bodies can compute, stabilise, absorb impact, exploit contact, and reduce computational burden of control.

Robots will leverage the embodied intelligence utilising intrinsic dynamics to unlock control-efficient and contact-rich movement capabilities in high-energy manoeuvres in swimming, rapid climbing, and landing.

Biosketch:               Prof. Dr. Ardian Jusufi

• most of formal training took place at University of California at Berkeley, graduating under supervision Prof. Bob Full at the CiBER center.
• After a postdoc at University of Cambridge Queens’ College, he joined Prof. Robert Wood`s MicroRobotics Lab at Harvard University.
• He was a Lecturer at Sydney’s Robotics Institute from 2016 before being appointed an independent Cyber Valley Max Planck Research Group Leader [~Associate Prof.] at the MPI for Intelligent Systems in 2018, where he was employed through 2023.

• Prof. Dr. Jusufi founded the Soft Kinetic Group at the Engineering Sciences Department at the Swiss Federal Labs for Materials Science and Technology while he was also an Affiliated Group Leader at the University of Zurich Institute for NeuroInformatics INI, where he has since joined full time.
• Ardian has also been an Hon. Associate Professor of Macquarie University Sydney since 2022. He has been awarded numerous grants by the Swiss NSF (two currently active) as well as a from the Cyber Valley Research Fund and the Max Planck Society.

Prof. Dr. Ardian Jusufi | Institute for NeuroInformatics University of Zurich 

Head of Soft Kinetic Group, Engineering Sciences Department | Swiss Federal Labs for Materials Science and Technology Empa

formerly Independent Max Planck Research Group Leader at the MPI for Intelligent Systems
and Associate Faculty Member at ETH Center for Learning Systems

Hon. Associate Professor | Macquarie University

Prof. Dr. Ardian Jusufi   Institute for NeuroInformatics, University of Zurich; Engineering Sci. Dept., Swiss Federal Labs Mat. Sci. Technology; Hon. Assoc. Prof., Macquarie University

➡️  Empa: https://www.empa.ch/web/juar/
➡️  Soft Kinetic: https://www.empa.ch/web/soft-kinetic/

Prof. Dr. Jusufi chaired a Soft Robotics Symposium at PPS38 that was attended by leading roboticists, and has chaired sessions in several conferences including IEEE RoboSoft, Robotics Science and Systems, AMAM, as well as IEEE ICRA workshop presentations.

We have open positions!  Please contact the PI: ardian.jusufi@uzh.ch