Josh Pinskier
Area of research:
Soft Robotics
Research project details:
Computational Design of Soft robotics – By replacing rigid components and joints with soft and flexible materials, the robot’s body implicitly performs complex control operations through morphological computation.
The approach has significant advantages in grasping soft or fragile objects and navigating unstructured terrain. However, without the constraints of rigid joints, soft robots are slow and unintuitive to design. My work investigates computational design techniques to automatically design efficient, custom soft robots and grippers.
Location:
Data61, Pullenvale, QLD
My expectations from a mentoring partnership:
- Career related and network building – I’m looking to develop my capacity as a future research leader over the next 2.5 years and would appreciate mentorship to guide me towards an developing and independent area of research and building academic and industry connections to facilitate that path.
- I would expect to catch up in person (preferable) or via video every month or two and have some informal contact between those meetings
- If you have familiarity with robotics/engineering/computer science, that would be ideal, but not essential
My general interests:
Using my background in mechatronics, I completed a PhD in compliant nanopositioner design at Monash University in 2019. After which I continued at Monash as a postdoc and lecturer.
In late 2020 I joined Data61’s Material Robotics team (part of CPS) through the CERC program.
As recent arrival into Queensland from the south, I’m happily acclimatising to the endless warmth and sunshine, but still obsessively practice the Victorian traditions of AFL and Coffee.
I enjoy building and tinkering and applying research to real world problems, which is why I’m keen to develop links into industry to grow and spread my work.