Introduction

The use of robots for streamlining routine patient care tasks (e.g. managing pharmacy, hospital logistics, supplies, inventory, cleaning and disinfection), reducing the physical demands on human workers, ensuring high-throughput laboratory/point-of-care tests, and maintaining more efficient operational processes is becoming a major demand in modern hospitals. During the COVID-19 pandemic, robots are deployed for a much wider range of tasks to help reduce exposure to pathogens, ensuring a safe environment for both patients and health workers. They are used for clinical care, public safety, laboratory and supply chain automation, and out-of-hospital care, quality of life, and continuity of work and education. The major research effort of the Centre ranges from service robots for hospital automation, to new robotic platforms used for high throughput screening and in vitro diagnostics, as well as those used in single-cell transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics, supporting the drive towards building the hospitals of the future and personalised medicine.

Research Interests

• Field robotics for hospital logistics, disinfection, pharma and lab automation
• Smart capsules for patient transport and intelligent ICUs
• Robotics for high throughput proteomics, metabolomics and single-cell omics
• Robotics for high throughput screening and in vitro diagnostics
• Remote presence robots
• Robotics for managing infectious diseases