Petar Curkovic, PhD Assistant Professor University of Zagreb Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and naval architecture Department of Robotics and Manufacturing Systems Automation Ivana Lucica 5 10000 Zagreb Croatia

Bio I am an assistant professor in the Department of Robotics and Manufacturing Systems Automation at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture (FMENA), University of Zagreb. Before joining FMENA I was a postdoc at the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University, in Creative Machines Lab, under Hod Lipson. I received BS in experimental mechanics under professor Damir Semenski  and PhD in robotics under professor Bojan Jerbic from FMENA.

Research My research is about designing safe, compliant, and unconventional robots to help people in their everyday activities. To create such robots, I use a combination of mechanical engineering, materials science, and robotics. This approach enables the design of robots activated by different stimuli including pressurized fluids, thermal energy, magnetic phenomena, inertial forces, and combinations thereof. Once actuated, these robots can grasp and manipulate various objects, walk, crawl, conform to shape, vibrate to move, and navigate in confined and narrow spaces. To get more information of my scinetific interests, please visit my recent publications list here: Google scholar profile, and my ORCID profile.

Projects My students and I are involved in various projects including the following: design of a soft anthropomorphic hand and actuators, a spider like robot self-learning to walk, soft bellow type actuators, conforming multi-material lattice structures, and robots using vibrations to move.