Meet The Team

Jamie Paik is Director and Founder of Reconfigurable Robotics Lab (RRL) of Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) and a core member of Swiss National Centers of Competence in Research (NCCR) Robotics consortium. RRL’s research leverages expertise in multi-material fabrication and smart material actuation toward unique robotic platforms. At Harvard University’s Microrobotics Laboratory, she started developing unconventional robots that push the physical limits of material and mechanisms. Her latest research effort is in soft robotics and self-morphing Robogami (robotic origami). Robogamis transforms autonomously its planar shape to 2D or 3D by folding in predefined patterns and sequences, just like the paper art, origami. Soft material robots and robogamis are designed to be interactive with the users and their environments through both innate and active reconfigurations. Such characteristics of the RRL’s robots have direct applications in medical, automobile, space, and wearable robots. While this novel technology has been published in multiple academic journals such as in Soft Robotics Journal, IEEE Transactions in Robotics, Nature, and Science, Jamie’s co-founded start-up, Foldaway-Haptics, has pushed the boundaries of the industrial applications of these robots as seen in TED conference 2019. The latest robogami was displayed as a part of Mercedez’s 2020 concept car, Avatar, during CES 2020 where the robogamis created a reconfigurable and morphing airfoils.

Anastasia Bolotnikova is a postdoc leading the CIS collaboration grant on Intelligent Assistive Robotics. The focus of this project is on development and integration of the robotic solution into an intelligent assistive environment for people with limited mobility, in collaboration with Professor Jamie Paik (RRL) and Professor Auke Ijspeert (BioRob). Anastasia Bolotnikova received the M.Sc. degree in Computer Science from the University of Tartu, Estonia, in 2017. Later that year, she started working as a robotics researcher at SoftBank Robotics Europe (SBRE). As part of her work with SBRE she entered a doctoral program in the University of Montpellier, France. She received the Ph.D degree in Robotics from University of Montpellier in March of 2021.

Fabio is currently a PhD candidate at RRL. He graduated from EPFL with a Bachelor in Microengineering and a Master in Robotics with a Master Thesis done at Northeastern University (Boston, MA). His interests include origami robotics, their applications towards interactive and wearable systems as well as their actuation methods. Recently, he has been focusing on building a modular surface to build the interactive environment of the future.

Mustafa Mete received his bachelor and master degrees in electrical & electronics and control engineering from Bogazici University, Turkey. He is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree in robotics with RRL, EPFL. His current research interests include modeling, design, fabrication, and control of origami robots, soft wearable robots, and haptics.

Kevin is currently a PhD candidate at RRL. He graduated from Simon Fraser University (Canada) and KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden) for his bachelor and master degrees respectively. His interests include modular robotics, electronic systems, communication networking, and mechanical design.

Serhat Demirtas is a Scientific Assistant at RRL. He graduated from Istanbul Technical University Mechanical Engineering Department in 2017. He completed his master's degree in Mechanical Engineering at Boğaziçi University in 2020. His main research interests include human-robot interaction, augmented reality, and modular robotics.

Ziqiao is currently a PhD student at RRL. He graduated from Xi’an Jiaotong University (China) and KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden) for his bachelor and master degrees respectively.His current research interests include electronic, control systems, and modular robotics.