Konstantinos Vasios, a member of our consortium and a second-year PhD student at the University of Essex, was a speaker at this year’s conference organised by theNational Structural Integrity Research Centre, presenting his work on” Bridging the Simulation to Reality Gap in Robotics”. The event occurred at the TWI Ltd headquarters in Cambridge, UK, between June 14th and 15th of June, 2023. Its focus centres on industry-led postgraduate research that aspires to provide solutions to current technology challenges.

The presentation, closely linked to the SoftGrip project work, discusses the design of a simulation environment for the manipulation task, the exploration of sim2real techniques for the real-world system setup and proposes an innovative control pipeline encapsulating the simulation as a training platform but also as a live, in-situ, abstraction layer. This research aims to bring SoftGrip a step closer to the successful harvesting of mushrooms by identifying the best possible way to handle, outroot, and approach their delicate nature.

To check out the full paper: PDF of the poster