Bio-inspired Robotics: Nature Meets Technology

Chaomin Luo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Mississippi State University. His research interests include robotics, control and automation, intelligent systems, and autonomous systems. Dr. Luo was the recipient of the Best Paper Awards in ASEE 2024, Biomimetic Intelligence and Robotics, IEEE International Conference on Information and Automation, International Conference on Swarm Intelligence, and SWORD Conference. Dr. Luo is active nationally and internationally in his research field. He was the Program Co-Chair in 2018 IEEE International Conference on Information and Automation (IEEE-ICIA’2018), Co-Chair in the 2020 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence, and Plenary Session Co-Chair in the 2021 International Conference on Swarm Intelligence. He was the Chair and Vice Chair of IEEE SEM - Computational Intelligence Chapter and Chair of IEEE SEM - Computational Intelligence Chapter and Chair of Education Committee of IEEE SEM. He has organized and chaired several special sessions on topics of Intelligent Vehicle Systems and Bio-inspired Intelligence in reputed international conferences such as IJCNN, IEEE-SSCI, IEEE-CEC, IEEE-CASE, and IEEE-Fuzzy, etc. He has extensively published in reputed journals and conference proceedings, such as IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, IEEE Transactions on SMC, IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, IEEE-ICRA, and IEEE-IROS, etc.  Dr. Luo serves as Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems, International Journal of Robotics and Automation, and Intelligence and Robotics.

Rob Scharff is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Integrative Systems and Design and the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering of The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). Prior to that, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Bioinspired Soft Robotics group at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT). He obtained a PhD degree at the department of Design Engineering in 2021 from Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), the Netherlands. His research focuses on soft robotics, with an emphasis on underwater locomotion and manipulation, and the design and manufacturing of bioinspired soft actuators with integrated proprioceptive and tactile sensors. He is currently Associate Editor for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) and was Associate Editor for the 2024 IEEE/RAS-EMBS BioRob conference. He was also Chair of the 2022 Dutch Soft Robotics Summer School & Symposium in the Netherlands. He has published in and reviewed for top journals in the field of robotics, including AAAS Science Robotics, IEEE Transactions on Robotics, and IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics.

Tingjun Lei is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of North Dakota. His research spans multiple interdisciplinary areas, including bio-inspired artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and autonomous systems, optimization and evolutionary computation, human-autonomy teaming (HAT), intelligent transportation systems, and applied machine learning. He was honored with the 2024 Best Paper Award from Biomimetic Intelligence and Robotics and received Best Paper Awards from the 2022 International Conference on Swarm Intelligence (ICSI 2022) and the 2024 American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE ECE Division). Dr. Lei serves as an Editorial Board Member for Intelligence and Robotics, Robot Learning, and Biomimetic Intelligence and Robotics. He has also actively contributed as a Technical Program Committee (TPC) member for numerous international conferences, including IEEE CEC, IEEE IJCNN, ICSI, and PRIS. He was awarded the Early Career Scholars Award by the University of North Dakota and the Best Graduate Researcher Award by the ECE Department at Mississippi State University.