Embodied Intelligence with Adaptive Morphology

My research is motivated by understanding the fundamental physics behind compelling natural phenomena, translating those principles into engineered systems using advanced materials and fabrication, and ultimately developing mechanisms that enable robots to coexist with humans safely, intelligently, and resiliently. This philosophy bridges science and technology, with a strong emphasis on translational robotics.

In this seminar, I will focus on our efforts toward implementation embodied intelligence with adaptive morphology, or robotic systems whose physical structures can change, either passively or actively, to accommodate environmental variation, thereby reducing the burden on centralized computation and control. I will present examples across soft robotics, including whole-body compliant underwater robots, vibration-driven and bio-inspired locomotion, soft-flying platforms, and morphological designs for large-area haptic interfaces. I will also discuss safety-oriented mechanisms and recovery control strategies for drones and robot arms that combine adaptive morphology with multimodal sensing to maintain performance under collisions and other disturbances. 

Van Anh Ho (Senior Member, IEEE) received the PhD degree in Robotics from Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan, in 2012. He earned his BEng degree in Electrical Engineering from Hanoi University of Science and Technology in 2007, and subsequently completed his PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Ritsumeikan University in 2012. After receiving the JSPS Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2013, he joined the Advanced Technology R&D Center of Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, Japan, as a Research Scientist. From 2015 to 2017, he served as an Assistant Professor at Ryukoku University, Kyoto, Japan, where he established and led a laboratory focused on soft haptics and soft-body modeling. In 2017, he joined the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST), where he founded a laboratory dedicated to soft robotics. His research interests include soft robotics, soft human–robot interaction, tactile sensing, grasping and manipulation, and bio-inspired robotic systems.

Dr. Ho is a recipient of the prestigious Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Research Fellowship for Young Scientists during both his doctoral studies (DC) and postdoctoral training. He received the 2019 IEEE Nagoya Chapter Young Researcher Award and has been a finalist for several paper awards, including Best System Paper at RSS 2023, Best Paper at IEEE SII 2016, and Best Paper at IEEE RoboSoft 2020. He is a member of the Robotics Society of Japan (RSJ) and a Senior Member of IEEE. He has served as an Associate Editor for leading international robotics conferences, including RSS, ICRA, IROS, and RoboSoft, as well as for major robotics journals such as IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), and Advanced Robotics. He was General Co-Chair of the 2023 IEEE/SICE International Symposium on System Integration (SII), General Chair of SII 2024, and currently serves as Program Chair for IEEE/RAS RoboSoft 2026.