Junior Associate Professor Sajid Nisar receives the 2019 Young Award

Sajid Nisar, Junior Associate Professor of Robotics at the Nagamori Institute of Actuators, has received the 2019 Young Award. The award is given by the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society's Japan Joint Chapter to outstanding young researchers in the field of robotics and automation. Professor Nisar received the award on May 20 at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) held in Montreal, Canada. The award celebrates the achievements of his paper, “Effects of Different Hand-Grounding Locations on Haptic Performance with a Wearable Kinesthetic Haptic Device”, presented at the conference.

When human operators control robots remotely, they cannot feel the forces of interaction between the robot and its environment. This absence of the sense of touch (called haptic feedback) is known to decrease the operator's performance while operating the robot. To address this problem, Prof. Nisar and his coworkers developed three different wearable haptic devices that provide the human operator with a sense of robotic touch on their fingertips. The researchers investigated the effects of different device designs and demonstrated experimentally that operator performance increases significantly more for some specific design choices compared to others. The technology they developed and their subsequent research findings have the potential to improve performance in various teleoperated robotic applications, notably in robot-assisted surgery by making it safer and easier for the surgeon to perform.

Professor Nisar plans to continue his research activities in the Faculty of Engineering at Kyoto University of Advanced Science, scheduled to open in 2020.

Professor Nisar said, “I am extremely happy to receive the 2019 Young Award from the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society’s Japan Chapter. The occasion of the award — the IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA) — was of immense importance as ICRA has been the number one robotics conference in the world, known for many historic robotic inventions first disclosed at this prestigious forum. It was heartwarming to present my research to the world’s leading scientists and robotics experts. I would like to thank all the mentors and colleagues who encouraged and supported me in this research. I feel motivated to continue doing scientific research with an aim to solve real-world problems through innovative and useful robotic technology.”