Dr David Hardman

Henslow Fellow 2024

Dr David Hardman works in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge and is a Henslow Fellow at Fitzwilliam College. He completed his PhD in Cambridge's Bio-Inspired Robotics Laboratory, where he focused on the implementation of unconventional soft materials in robotic systems, with a particular interest in medical applications.

David's current research tackles the challenges involved in equipping robots with a sophisticated sense of touch and tactile perception. This requires the design, development, and fabrication of soft and flexible tactile sensors, in order for robots to accomplish a comparable range of physical and dextrous tasks to humans.

Human skins provide flexibility, compliance, pressure sensing, temperature sensing, and stimulus localisation whilst also being able to detect and heal damages. Sensing tasks which we perform with ease, such as high resolution tactile localisation or multimodal sensing, are extremely cumbersome to reproduce for robots; artificial skins are usually covered with hundreds of high-density wired sensors, which are expensive and highly fragile when the skin is stretched. Humans reduce the need for universal high-density sensing by varying the sensor distributions across their skins: our fingertips are much more sensitive than our palms. As technologies move towards the design of increasingly general-purpose robots, we require soft sensors which replicate these essential properties without sacrificing robustness, longevity, or straightforward fabrication. By combining robotics, mechanical design, materials science, and machine learning, David explores the challenges behind developing single-material 'e-skins' which replicate all of these properties, enabling robots to sense, perform, and recover from complex and dangerous tasks. Beyond the application of these technologies to artificial skins for robots, he also researches the benefits of their application in wearables, prosthetics, and interactive devices.

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