Helge Wurdemann is a roboticist and Associate Professor of Robotics leading research on soft haptics and robotics at UCL Mechanical Engineering. He is also Co-Director of the Intelligent Mobility at UCL (IM@UCL, www.im-ucl.com) lab, a full-size driving simulator. His Soft Haptics group (www.softhaptics.website) focuses on the hardware design and application of soft material robotic systems that have the ability to change their shape and stiffness on demand bridging the gap between traditional rigid and entirely soft robots. Dr Wurdemann creates and embeds innovative stiffness-controllable mechanisms as well as combine advanced Artificial Intelligence with control strategies in robotic prototypes emerging from his lab.

Dr Wurdemann has authored/co-authored more than 100 peer-reviewed papers. The majority of his papers are published in top journals of the field, including top transactions and journals of the IEEE and ASME, and in proceedings of leading international conferences. He currently is Associate Editor for prestigious robotics conferences (ICRA and IROS) and served as Associate VP within the IEEE Robotics & Automation Society Conference Activities Board and as member of the IET Robotics and Mechatronics TPN Executive Board. He is Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute and Co-General Chair of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2023, the premium robotics conference, which will be hosted for the first time in the UK.