ECE/UBC engineers develop breakthrough ‘robot skin’ in collaboration with Honda researchers

ECE/UBC engineers develop breakthrough ‘robot skin’ in collaboration with Honda researchers

UBC engineers created the sensor in collaboration with Frontier Robotics, Honda’s research institute. Credit: UBC Applied Science/Paul Joseph

Originally published in UBC News

Smart soft sensor can improve prosthetics and enhance human-robot interaction

Smart, stretchable and highly sensitive, a new soft sensor developed by UBC and Honda researchers opens the door to a wide range of applications in robotics and prosthetics.

When applied to the surface of a prosthetic arm or a robotic limb, the sensor skin provides touch sensitivity and dexterity, enabling tasks that can be difficult for machines such as picking up a piece of soft fruit. The sensor is also soft to the touch, like human skin, which helps make human interactions safer and more lifelike.

“Our sensor can sense several types of forces, allowing a prosthetic or robotic arm to respond to tactile stimuli with dexterity and precision. For instance, the arm can hold fragile objects like an egg or a glass of water without crushing or dropping them,” said study author Dr. Mirza Saquib Sarwar, who created the sensor as part of his PhD work in electrical and computer engineering at UBC’s faculty of applied science.

Giving machines a sense of touch

The sensor is primarily composed of silicone rubber, the same material used to make many skin special effects in movies. The team’s unique design gives it the ability to buckle and wrinkle, just like human skin.

“Our sensor uses weak electric fields to sense objects, even at a distance, much as touchscreens do. But unlike touchscreens, this sensor is supple and can detect forces into and along its surface. This unique combination is key to adoption of the technology for robots that are in contact with people,” explained Dr. John Madden, senior study author and a professor of electrical and computer engineering who leads the Advanced Materials and Process Engineering Laboratory (AMPEL) at UBC.

The UBC team developed the technology in collaboration with Frontier Robotics, Honda’s research institute. Honda has been innovating in humanoid robotics since the 1980s, and developed the well-known ASIMO robot. It has also developed devices to assist walking, and the emerging Honda Avatar Robot.

“Dr. Madden’s lab has significant expertise in flexible sensors and we’re happy to collaborate with this team in developing tactile sensors that can be applied to robots,” said Mr. Ishizaki Ryusuke, one of the study’s lead authors and chief engineer at Frontier Robotics.

Practical and scalable

The researchers say the new sensor is simple to fabricate, which makes it easy to scale to cover large surface areas and to manufacture large quantities.

Dr. Madden noted that sensors and intelligence are making machines more capable and lifelike, increasingly allowing people to work and play alongside them, but much more can be achieved.

“Human skin has a hundred times more sensing points on a fingertip than our technology does, making it easier to light a match or sew. As sensors continue to evolve to be more skin-like, and can also detect temperature and even damage, there is a need for robots to be smarter about which sensors to pay attention to and how to respond. Developments in sensors and artificial intelligence will need to go hand in hand.”

Interview language(s): English (Sarwar, Madden), French (Madden)

Images and b-roll available for media here: https://bit.ly/UBCsoftsensor

ECE Professor and Research Team’s Paper Chosen for IEEE Top Picks in Test and Reliability 2023

Case where a Self-Driving Car mistakes a transporting truck (left) for a bird (right) due to soft errors in the hardware

Congratulations to Dr. Karthik Pattabiraman, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UBC, whose paper “Understanding Error Propagation in Deep-Learning Neural Networks (DNN) Accelerators and Applications” was chosen for IEEE Top Picks in Test and Reliability (TPTR) 2023!

The paper was initially published in 2017 with former ECE PhD student Guanpeng Li, now a faculty member at the University of Iowa, and with researchers from Nvidia and MIT.

Submitted publications for IEEE Top Picks in Test and Reliability were reviewed by a committee of renowned experts in the field, and papers were then shortlisted. The paper was chosen by a competitive process, including a 2-page submission highlighting the impact of the paper to be considered. 

The paper was presented at the IEEE Top Picks in Test and Reliability workshop on October 12-13, 2023, to present the most impactful publications in the past six years in the areas of VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) test and reliability.  

Dr. Pattabiraman and his team’s paper examined Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) usage in safety-critical contexts such as Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) and robots and their reliability to understand the effect of soft errors on DNNs. Soft errors are typically caused as a result of high-energy particles striking electronic devices, causing them to malfunction. It was demonstrated through these researchers’ work that DNNs are not resilient to soft errors and that a single fault can cause safety violations in the operation of DNNs.

Dr. Pattabiraman and his team have continued working on the problem of ML resilience to soft errors and have recently published a paper on the effect of soft errors on Large Language Models (LLMs), “Resilience Assessment of Large Language Models under Transient Hardware Faults”.

Through Dr. Pattabiraman and his team’s work and observations, software-based techniques for DNN resilience have changed to account for soft errors!

More information on Dr. Pattabiraman’s work and the Dependable Systems Lab at UBC.

Get to Know Your Professor

The “Get to Know…” series is meant to introduce incoming students to the people in ECE and learn more about the ongoing research and work happening in ECE!

Dr. Joseph Salfi is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UBC! Professor Salfi’s research focuses on the investigation, realization and assembly of building blocks for quantum information systems that could one day perform calculations well beyond the capabilities of classical information technologies. His work includes optimizing the coherence and scalability of quantum bits, engineering the interactions of qubits for quantum computers and simulators, and building hybrid systems of spin qubits and microwave photons.

In this instalment, Professor Joe Salfi shares the courses he will be teaching, his research focus, and more! 

Which course(s) will you be teaching this Fall semester?

ELEC 204: Linear Circuits (for EngPhys)
CPEN 514: Quantum Information and Computation

What interests you most about your research/ what drew you to this topic?  

My research area is Quantum Information and Computation. What draws me to it is a combination of three things. The first is that it is a high-impact area that attracts top researchers. Quantum Computation is a completely new way to process information that promises to enable the solution to computational problems that are out of reach using any conceivable classical computer. The second is that we are close to delivering on the promise described above for industrial use-cases. Proof-of-principal quantum computers have been demonstrated that can perform calculations that are impossible on classical supercomputers, and the next challenge is to do this in an industrial use-case. The third, and probably most important reason I am interested in it, is that it combines theoretical and experimental quantum physics (my area of graduate training), and electrical and computer engineering (my area of undergraduate training), two areas that I am most interested in. 

Where is your favourite spot on campus?

For work: My lab, in AMPEL 111, housing quantum experiments.
Outside work: The Rose Garden. The UBC Aquatic Centre. Loafe (good coffee!).

What is your favourite coffee/tea drink to order? 

Americano and espresso.

What is a fun thing about you that others might not know? 

Physical activities like Squash and Cycling are very important to me.

Find out more about Assistant Professor Joe Salfi’s research

Get to Know an ECE Grad Student

The “Get to Know…” series is meant to introduce incoming students to the people in ECE and learn more about the ongoing research and work happening in ECE!

Hooman Vaseli is a 4th year PhD student in Electrical and Computer Engineering! He received his Bachelor of Applied Science degree in Electrical Engineering at UBC.

Hooman’s focus is in the Robotics and Control Lab (RCL) where the research focuses on machine learning, computer vision, and Natural Language Processing (NLP), specifically for automatic analysis of Electronic Health Records (EHR) and medical imaging data such as echocardiography (echo), which is the ultrasound images and videos taken from the heart. He is focused on improving risk prediction of ischemic stroke by analyzing patients’ echo and EHR. 

In this instalment, Hooman shares his current research focus, advice for ECE students, and more!

What courses were you a TA in? 

I TAed CPEN 211, CPEN 333, and ELEC 371. 

What advice would you give second-year students to succeed in their ECE studies? 

Find what you are passionate about in this vast field of ECE. If you like programming, learn coding and algorithms very well (even if you are in ELEC), especially if you want to focus on Artificial Intelligence, because, unfortunately, not so many researchers in the field have your background or the kind of opportunity you have now in learning proper coding skills. And no matter what grades you get at the end of the day, enjoy life as it’s short!
P.S. For CPEN211, Verilog is not like software programming that runs line by line! Imagine you are drawing the blueprint of a circuit but through coding. So it’s an “everything everywhere all at once” kind of thing!

What is your favourite coffee/tea drink to order? 

Vanilla Cold Brew 

Favourite hobby? 

Right now, salsa dancing at UBC Salsa Rueda Club. It’s fun, a good exercise for hand-eye coordination and memory skills, and I get to meet new people. 

Where is your favourite place in Vancouver? Favourite spot on campus? 

I love everywhere in Vancouver! Ocean, mountain, city! Probably Cypress Mountain is my favourite spot for its nice hiking trails and ski resort. My favourite campus spots are Rec Center for the bird-coop gym and leagues I used to attend, and NEST for our student clubs. 

For more information about Hooman’s research, visit https://www.linkedin.com/in/hoomanvaseli/ 

ECE Assistant Professor Awarded Canada Research Chair in Quantum Software and Algorithms

Congratulations to ECE Assistant Professor Olivia Di Matteo on being awarded a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Quantum Software and Algorithms! Tier 2 Chairs, tenable for five years and renewable once, are for exceptional emerging researchers, acknowledged by their peers as having the potential to lead in their field. For each Tier 2 Chair, the institution receives $100,000 annually for five years, with an additional $20,000 annual research stipend for first-term Tier 2 Chairs.

The CRC Program furthers the advancement of Canada’s research and development strategy. Chairholders improve our depth of knowledge and quality of life, strengthen Canada’s international competitiveness, and help train the next generation of highly skilled people through student supervision, teaching, and the coordination of other researchers’ work. To learn more about the CRC program, visit: https://research.ubc.ca/federal-research-chair-programs/canada-research-chairs. 

Read on to hear about our interview with Dr. Olivia Di Matteo, her work at ECE, and future research plans! 

How do you feel about being named a Canada Research Chair? 

I am both thrilled and stunned! 

Can you explain the process of selection for this nomination?

The nomination came as part of my faculty position, which I started in January 2022, but the actual application process began about 2 years ago. I had to write a grant proposal, which went through rounds of internal and external review. It was a bit intimidating since it was the first grant proposal I’d ever written, but the team at SPARC was extremely helpful, and colleagues in my department provided a lot of support as well.

What were some of your recent works that contributed to you being named as a CRC chair?

I’ve worked on many different topics, so it’s hard to pinpoint any one thing! But in particular, I’ve developed and implemented new methods for characterizing quantum systems, synthesizing quantum circuits, and applications of quantum computing in physics. I’ve also made many contributions to an open source quantum software framework, PennyLane, that other researchers use for their own work.

What does your current research look like? 

My group works on quantum software and algorithms, so the day-to-day is a lot of programming. On the software side, one area of focus is developing tools for automating and improving quantum compilation, which is the pipeline that translates high-level algorithms into the language of quantum hardware. On the algorithms side, we are exploring the potential use of qutrits (instead of qubits) in quantum algorithms and working on some techniques for noise mitigation.

What is something people wouldn’t expect about your research topic? 

That there are problems that are hard even for quantum computers. There’s a serious amount of hype around my field right now, and quantum computers are often presented as super-advanced machines that will solve every problem exponentially faster. There are definitely some specific (but important!) problems for which we expect this will be the case (once we overcome the major engineering hurdles of building them, of course). But there are classes of problems we believe will remain hard.

What are your future research plans? 

Lately, I’ve been diving into some applications of quantum computing to nuclear theory and particle physics, which has been really fun, since my training is actually as a physicist. The mapping of those problems to quantum algorithms in software through the compilation and optimization process is really interesting, and I’m hopeful that with some advances on the software front, we’ll soon be able to leverage the hardware to solve more realistic problems. I’m also thinking about how we can make quantum computing software more accessible (e.g., through better abstraction and helpful debugging tools) so that more people can use the technology in their own work.

To learn more about Dr. Olivia Di Matteo’s work, visit: https://ece.ubc.ca/olivia-di-matteo/

Get to Know Your TA

The “Get to Know…” series is meant to introduce incoming students to the people in ECE and learn more about the ongoing research and work happening in ECE!

Mustafa Hammood is a 4th year PhD student in Electrical and Computer Engineering at UBC! Mustafa completed his BASc from UBC in 2017 and specialized in the field of semiconductor optics and photonics right after his graduation, working in the silicon photonics industry.

He is developing optical filters for silicon photonics technology, specifically on integrated semiconductor silicon chips. Mustafa’s thesis centres on the creation of these filters for integrated circuits, enabling the efficient splitting and combining of wavelengths on compact optical waveguides made on the traditional silicon chip. The goal of these optical filters is to enable applications traditionally made on and reliant on large, meticulously aligned free-space optics to be easily made on mass-producible, compact, monolithic silicon chips. This technology has potential applications in fields such as optical communication, quantum optical computing, and optical biosensing, among others.

In this instalment, Mustafa shares his current research focus, the course he will be TAing, and advice for second-year ECE students!

What course will you be a TA in? 

I have TA’d several terms of ELEC291, ELEC301, ELEC412, and ELEC582. This winter I will be TAing ELEC412 (Optical waveguides and photonics) for one last term! 

What advice would you give to second-year students to succeed in their ECE studies?

My advice would be to seize every opportunity you’re exposed to. You never know what a simple summer volunteer opportunity could lead your career to. Create opportunities for yourself by offering your help and knowledge to those around you. Finally, have friends and colleagues who you can look up to and be your role models and mentors (both personally and professionally) and who can push you in times of uncertainty and when you need guidance.

What is your favourite coffee/tea drink to order?

My favourite drink right now would be Saffron tea: saffron, mint, ginger, and a cinnamon stick (hot or cold) – a perfect summer drink!

Favourite hobby?

Naturally, photography (analog and digital)!

Where is your favourite spot on campus? Favourite place in Vancouver?

My favourite spot on UBC campus would be tied between Nitobe Memorial Garden and that small sloped park by the IKB clock tower (a perfect spot for a quiet afternoon nap). In Vancouver, it would be VanDusen Garden.

For more information about Mustafa’s research, visit https://www.linkedin.com/in/mustafa-hammood-01/

Get to Know Your Professor

As we near the Fall semester, ECE is announcing the “Get to Know…” series, which is meant to introduce incoming students to the people in ECE and learn more about the ongoing research and work happening in ECE!

Dr. Mohammad Shahrad is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UBC! Professor Shahrad’s research focuses on building resource-efficient cloud computing systems. He leads the UBC Cloud Infrastructure Research for Reliability, Usability, and Scalability (CIRRUS) lab. He has built novel scheduling schemes for different cloud workloads, modeled user-provider interactions to propose new pricing models, and built a new processor for efficient off-chip scalability of cloud workloads.

In this instalment, Professor Shahrad shares the course he will be teaching this fall, his research focus, and more!

Which course will you be teaching this semester?

The course that I’ll be teaching in the Fall is CPEN 221: Software Construction I

What interests you most about your research (cloud computing), and what drew you to this topic?

It is interdisciplinary, applied, and fast-moving.

Where is your favourite spot on campus?

The Neville Scarfe building, the southwestern corner (facing the Main Mall). The ivy on that wall has the most mesmerizing fall colours.

What is your favourite coffee/tea drink to order?

Rooibos tea

What is a fun fact about you that others might not know?

I am competitive at foosball.

Find out more about Assistant Professor Mohammad Shahrad’s research

ECE Researchers Awarded Outstanding Young Researcher Award

Congratulations to ECE Professor Kenichi Takahata and his research team, Mohammad Reza Yousefi Darestani, Dirk Lange, and Ben H. Chew, on being awarded the Oral Presentation Winner for the Outstanding Young Researcher Award in Transducers 2023, one of the largest international conferences on solid-state sensors, actuators, and microsystems!

The presentation featured “A Sensor-Integrated “Smart” Ureteral Stent and Wireless In-Vitro Test for Real-time Obstruction Detection”, which examined the use of intelligent ureteral stent technology for monitoring kidney pressure to detect a ureteral obstruction.

For more information about Dr. Takahata and his research team in our ECE Department, please visit: https://ece.ubc.ca/kenichi-takahata/

TrustML Workshop @ UBC

On June 23, 2023, the TrustML Research Excellence cluster (https://trustml.ubc.ca) hosted a TrustML Workshop @ UBC, in the Fred Kaiser Building at the UBC Vancouver campus! This event drew over 100 attendees, with representatives from over 20 organizations, including University of Pennsylvania, IBM Research, Simon Fraser University, Duke University, Michigan State University, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and more!

The TrustML cluster facilitates the development of trustworthy machine-learning-based systems: systems that are reliable, secure, explainable, and ethical. The purpose of the workshop was to bring together researchers and practitioners who share a common interest in this topic. The workshop encompassed a comprehensive program consisting of engaging lectures and tech briefing given by prominent speakers from the United States, China, and Canada. The event also included a highly-interactive poster session, where researchers discussed their work and fostered connections, contributing to the growth of our dynamic research community!

For more details about the event, see: https://trustml.ubc.ca/events/trustml-workshop-ubc-june-2023

Dr. Julia Rubin awarded the CS-CAN | INFO-CAN Outstanding Early Career Computer Science Researcher Prize!

Congratulations to ECE professor Dr. Julia Rubin, recipient of this year’s CS-Can|Info-Can Outstanding Early Career Computer Science Researcher Prize! 

This prize recognizes top early-career computer science academic researchers who are within 10 years of completing their Ph.D. for excellence in research. Congratulations Dr. Rubin!

To learn more about this award and Dr. Rubin’s work, please visit https://people.ece.ubc.ca/mjulia/