Adamya Singh Dhaker

Hello! I am a PhD student at ETH Zürich and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, working with Dr. Janneke Schwaner (Neuromechanics of Movement Group, MPI) and Prof. Robert Katzschmann (Soft Robotics Laboratory, ETH). I have been awarded the Max Planck-ETH Center for Learning Systems doctoral fellowship to work on truly integrating biomechanical principles of passive mechanical adaptation in animals into soft robots to enhance their ‘embodied intelligence’ and reduce their active control requirements.

Prior to starting my doctoral work, I greatly enjoyed my time in sunny Singapore, where received an M.Eng in mechanical engineering at NUS, and a B. Eng in aerospace engineering (minor in applied physics) at NTU. I was fortunate to work with Prof. Cecilia Laschi and Prof. Gianmarco Mengaldo on high-fidelity modeling of octopus arm biomechanics. I also spent some time as an ETH Robotics Student Fellow at the Soft Robotics Laboratory, ETH Zürich, working on a developing fluid-structure interaction framework for biohybrid robots. I deeply enjoyed collaborating Prof. Luca Dede’ and Prof. Francesco Regazzoni as a visiting researcher at the 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 am broadly interested in investigating the biomechanical principles underlying passive adaptation that lends ‘mechanical’ intelligence to animals, so that we can transfer the learned mechanical principles to soft robots and reduce their motor control requirements. More specifically, I am intrigued by the musculoskeletal architectures of the legs of ground-running birds and how these architectures embed passive mechanical control in the leg during complex-terrain locomotion. I use a mix of biological dissections, computational modeling and hardware fabrication to test my hypotheses with such birds. I am also passionate about reproducibility and pedagogy of the science that I am fortunate enough to do.

News

Projects

TL;DR: The octopus arm is a remarkable example of embodied intelligence. Densely-packed muscle fibers provide the arm with virtually infinite degrees of freedom. Biologists have used EMG signals to hypothesize which muscle synergies create canonical octopus arm movements. We created an anatomically accurate model of the octopus arm, with spatially arranged muscle fibers, to verify whether experimentally proposed synergies truly create the observed canonical movements.

TL;DR: Obtaining octopus arm kinematics are notoriously difficult. Here, we build our own markerless octopus arm centreline detection algorithm that extracts and post-processes the kinematics features of octopus arms during movement

TL;DR: We want need accurate fluid-solid coupling to simulate end-to-end multiphysics of biohybrid swimmers. Turns out, pressure projection (a.k.a mass conservation) in a Navier-Stokes solve can be treated as an energy minimization problem to advance a fluid-solid solve and obtain fast simulations.

Miscellanea

• Reviewer, IEEE-RAS RoboSoft
• Reviewer, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L)

• Teaching Assistant, Soft and Biohybrid Robotics Class, ETH Zürich, Spring 2026
• Tennis Coach, Yale-NUS College Tennis Team, 2024-2025

• 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. These days, I play for a local tennis club.
• 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.

This website template has been borrowed, with gratitude, from this source code by Jon Barron.

Last Updated: Jul 2026