Phd Student

Joint position with Politecnico di Bari and in collaboration with EPFL

**PhD student position in Electroadhesion Tribology for dexterous Soft Robotic Grippers**

Joint position between the Department of Mechanics, Mathematics and Management (DMMM) of Politecnico di Bari, with **top-notch expertise in tribology**, and Omnigrasp, a **pioneering start-up creating soft grippers with electro-active contacts**. Collaboration with EPFL in Switzerland, where the student will spend 6 months visiting.

Duration is 3 years, main working place is in Bari, Italy and the position is fully funded with a scholarship plus research funds.

**Your goal will be to create the next generation of dexterous soft grippers that can grasp delicate and flexible objects, having negligible energy consumption and requiring little control.** By making use of mechanical intelligence, demanding control tasks (force control, path planning, precise positioning) can be embedded into the gripper’s physical design. You will study tribology of electro-mechanical systems at the interface between the gripper and the object. The new scientific insight will be used to create novel architectures and select better materials. You will characterise the new gripper and validate it with Omnigrasp’s industry customers.

**Your activities will include conducting theoretical and experimental research, writing academic papers, presenting your work at international conferences, writing patents on your inventions and supervising MSc students.**

Work location will be at the DMMM of Politecnico di Bari. The DMMM has been selected as an _excellent department_ by the Italian Ministry of University and Research. It is a young and dynamic environment with 80 permanent staff members and 20 M€ as annual funding, state of the art facilities for high-performance computing and for characterization of materials and surfaces. Omnigrasp is a university spin-off incubated in-between EPFL and Politecnico di Bari. Omnigrasp is also hosted within the DMMM, making it easy for the student to work in-between the two institutions. Omnigrasp received the BRIDGE POC grant from the Swiss National Science Foundations and is currently part of an EU-funded project involving 10 partners from 7 European countries. Collaborations are also in UK, Japan and US. **Omnigrasp’s mission is to create soft robots to automate the most difficult automation tasks, with the minimum possible energy consumption and the simplest control.