Adamya Singh Dhaker

Hello! I'm an incoming PhD student at ETH Zürich and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (Stuttgart), where I will be supervised by Prof. Robert Katzschmann (Soft Robotics Laboratory, ETH) and Dr. Janneke Schwaner (Neuromechanics of Movement Group, MPI). I have been awarded a doctoral fellowship by the Max Planck-ETH Center for Learning Systems to work at the intersection of soft and biohybrid robotics, biomechanics and computational modeling.

Prior to starting my doctoral studies, I greatly enjoyed my time in sunny Singapore, where I completed my master's degree in mechanical engineering at NUS, and my bachelor's degree in aerospace engineering at NTU. I was fortunate to do my master's research on octopus arm modeling under the supervision of Prof. Cecilia Laschi and Prof. Gianmarco Mengaldo. I also spent some time at the Soft Robotics Laboratory, ETH Zürich and MOX Laboratory, Politecnico di Milano.

Please feel free to email me if you would like to discuss my research, your research, any potential collaborations or if you have any questions 😊

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Research Interests

I'm interested in soft and biohybrid robots, high-fidelity computational modeling and muscle biomechanics. Nature exhibits remarkable embodied intelligence, and I see computational modeling as a powerful tool to create a bridge for knowledge transfer between soft robotics and nature. More specifically, I want to use modeling to understand the embodied intelligence underlying soft biological systems and their biomechanical principles, so that we can use them to inform the design of more lightweight, compliant and mechanically intelligent assistive soft robots. My research up till now has been focused on modeling the octopus arm to understand how its muscle activation and architecture is linked to its deformation. Along with numerical models, I have also worked on understanding the environemntal interactions (fluid dynamics) of an octopus-inspired soft robot arm, along with a touch of computer vision for extracting octopus arm kinematics. With the ETH Soft Robotics Laboratory, I am working on developing 3-D flow solvers for biohybrid robots.

Projects

A high-fidelity computational model of the octopus arm, with implementation of all major arm muscle fibers. Muscles are activated by active stresses, and applying experimentally established activation sequences produce stereotypical motions as seen in real octopuses.

My role in this project involved designing and conducting the fluid dynamics analysis of a soft robot arm performing octopus arm reaching motion. Understanding the flow physics of the soft arm will provide insights into how drag is minimized and how flow structures evolve during reaching motion.

Kinematics of octopus arm reaching follow stereotypical profiles invariant across scales and species, though such data is rarely available in open literature. We developed an automatic, markerless algorithm to segment octopus arms from reaching videos. This algorithm extracts key kinematic data from the segmented videos to provide benchmarks for simulations and experiments.

Developing a fast, 3-D Eulerian fluid solver to couple with the ETH Zürich Soft Robotics Laboratory's in-house soft body simulation code, tailored for biohybrid robots. Turns out, pressure projection (aka mass conservation) in a Navier-Stokes solve can be treated as a minimization problem to advance the simulation.

Miscellanea

• Tennis: I've been playing for 14 years and coaching for the last 2. I’m grateful to have competed at the national level in India, and represented NTU and NUS.
• Reading: I enjoy a wide range of genres, and have recently developed a taste for philosophy.
• Politics: I follow both local and global political developments with keen interest.
• Food: It would be hard to overstate my love for all sorts of cuisines and food.

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