Professor Nathan Lepora
BA, MMath, PhD (Cambridge)
Expertise
Nathan F. Lepora is a Professor of Robotics & AI with interests in natural, artificial and embodied intelligence in robotics and neuroscience, including how to perceive, learn, interact, understand and manipulate our surroundings.
Current positions
Professor of Robotics and AI
School of Engineering Mathematics and Technology
Contact
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Biography
Nathan F. Lepora a Professor of Robotics & AI who leads the Dexterous Robotics Group in Bristol Robotics Laboratory.
He originally trained in Mathematics at the University of Cambridge then continued to a PhD and Research Fellowship in Theoretical Physics. He started a second career as a writer, focussing on science education, recently authoring 'Robots!' with Penguin House publishing. He changed fields in academia as a Research Associate in Computational Neuroscience then Biomimetic Robotics at the Department of Psychology, University of Sheffield.
In 2014, he was appointed a Lecturer in Robotics in the Department of Engineering Mathematics at the University of Bristol, promoted to a Senior Lecturer in 2016, Reader in 2017 and Professor in 2019.
From 2014-17, he was program director for Bristol's MSc in Robotics, which grew from an unsustainable <10 students to ~70 students in 2017. It has since grown to 100+ students, the largest in the UK and led to two further MSc programs.
In 2017, he was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Research Leadership Award on 'A Biomimetic Forebrain for Robot Touch', a major investment (4 postdocs) in research on the interface of computational neuroscience, AI and robotics. This research has been covered extensively in the media, including the BBC News, the World Service, all major newspapers, Bloomberg, Science and many others. In 2022, he was awarded an Elektra Award for 'University Research Project of the Year' from a public vote of technology magazine readers.
He is a co-investigator on the £5M ISCF Made Smarter Innovation Research Centre for 'Smart, Collaborative Industrial Robotics' and the £5M Horizon Europe project 'Advancing the physical intelligence and performance of roBOTs towards human-like bi-manual objects MANipulation'. His industrial research collaborators include Ultraleap, Ocado Technology, Google DeepMind and Shadow Robotics.
Research interests
Natural Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence, Embodied Intelligence, Robotics
Projects and supervisions
Research projects
Advancing the physical intelligence and performance of roBOTs towards human-like bi-manual objects MANipulation
Principal Investigator
Description
Partner on 8M Euro Horizon Europe award with CERTH (coordinator), Aristotle Univ Thessaloniki, Technical University Darmstadt, SSSA, Technical University Wien and industrial partners including Masoutis and ABB.Managing organisational unit
Department of Engineering MathematicsDates
01/11/2023 to 31/05/2027
The computational basis of foraging
Principal Investigator
Description
BBSRC project in collaboration with Universities of Nottingham (Lead) and Birmingham.Managing organisational unit
Department of Engineering MathematicsDates
15/02/2023 to 14/02/2025
The computational basis of foraging
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
School of Engineering Mathematics and TechnologyDates
15/02/2023 to 14/02/2025
ISCF Smart Collaborative Industrial Robotics Research Centre
Principal Investigator
Role
Co-Investigator
Description
ISCF/EPSRC Research Centre (£5M) with Universities of Loughborough (lead), Warwick, Strathclyde and CranfieldManaging organisational unit
Department of Engineering MathematicsDates
30/09/2021 to 29/03/2025
New Markets in Virtual Haptic Texture
Principal Investigator
Description
EPSRC Impact Acceleration Award (£50k) with industrial partner Ultraleap.Managing organisational unit
Department of Engineering MathematicsDates
01/07/2021 to 30/06/2022
Thesis supervisions
Human Inspired Multi-Modal Robot Touch
Supervisors
Active Inference in Simulated Cortical Circuits
Supervisors
Modelling reward-dependent replay of memory coordinated across hippocampus and nucleus accumbens
Supervisors
Tactile Perception and Control of a Soft Shear-Sensitive Optical Tactile Sensor
Supervisors
Soft Biomimetic Optical Tactile Sensors for Slip Detection and Grasp Recovery
Supervisors
A tactile robotic system to characterize mid-air haptics
Supervisors
A Touchy Subject
Supervisors
What can we learn from touch? Towards end-to-end learning from robot touch
Supervisors
Postnatal Development of the Action Potential Waveform in Cortical Neurons
Supervisors
Publications
Recent publications
30/01/2024Pose-and-shear-based tactile servoing
International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR)
Tactile-Driven Gentle Grasping for Human-Robot Collaborative Tasks
2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
Tac-VGNN: A Voronoi Graph Neural Network for Pose-Based Tactile Servoing
2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
An overview of robotic grippers
IEEE Potentials
Feature Attention as a Control Mechanism for the Balance of Speed and Accuracy in Visual Search
Computational Brain & Behavior
Teaching
2) Organizing robotics teaching for MSc Robotics students, as unit director for Robotic Research Technology and Methods (RRTM).
3) Supervising project students in robotics, AI and computational neuroscience. I like to teach students who 'co-create' projects with me. Many of my student projects have resulted in research publications, which has helped secure PhD funding for those students.