Dr Krishna Manaswi Digumarti

Biography

Dr. Krishna Manaswi Digumarti is a lecturer in the school of electrical engineering and robotics at QUT. He works with the QUT Centre of Robotics.

Dr. Digumarti's research is in the multi-disciplinary domain of soft robotics. In the past 10 years, he has worked on applications in automated grasping, locomotion, wearables and healthcare. His work resulted in the successful development of multiple devices, actuators, sensors, new materials, fabrication techniques, characterisation methods and test benches.

Technologies related to shape morphing, variable stiffness, computational design and materials characterisation are of particular interest to Dr. Digumarti. His work pushes the boundaries of sensing and actuation for robots that are dynamically interacting with the outside world as well as changing their own physical configuration.

In his most recent appointment, prior to joining QUT, Dr. Digumarti worked as a post-doctoral researcher at EPFL, Switzerland. His appointment was jointly with the Smart Transducers Lab and the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems. He worked on the European Union's MERGING project aimed at automating the handling of flexible and fragile materials like textiles, food packaging and technical fibre. His work resulted in the filing of a patent.

Dr. Digumarti received his PhD in robotics and autonomous systems from the University of Bristol and the University of the West of England, UK, in 2019. His work was with SoftLab Bristol, a part of the Bristol Robotics Lab, the largest multi-disciplinary robotics research center in the UK. For his thesis he developed novel mechanisms for shape changing robots inspired from the  Euglenoid family of microorganisms. Prior to that, he received a master's in robotics, systems and control from ETH Zurich in 2014. His thesis on optimizing the design of legged robots was jointly with the Autonomous Systems Lab at ETH as Disney Research Zurich. He graduated with a bachelor's in mechanical engineering with honours from the Indian Insititute of Technology Hyderabad in 2012.

Dr. Digumarti presented his work at the top conference and best journals of robotics and invented a new technology for grasping. His research featured on the BBC's science show, Click (episode: 50 shapes of goo), with a worldwide audience of 380 million households. It also appeared on Channel 4, and in the French media. He was invited to present his shape changing robots to biologists of the Euglenoid International Network in 2020.