Dr Jon Woolfrey

Profile

My name is Jonathan Woolfrey, but you can call me Jon. I am from Sydney, Australia!

When I left school, I did a trade in fitting & machining in the manufacturing industry. I was surrounded by robots in the factory I worked, so I decided to go study engineering. I did my Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical & Mechatronic Engineering with a Diploma in Engineering Practice at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS).

Whilst completing my Bachelor’s, I was fortunate enough to earn a scholarship with Transport for New South Wales, working in the Continuous Improvement group within the Maintenance Directorate at Sydney Trains. We conducted projects to improve the efficiency of corporate processes, and reliability of engineering systems. It is here I earnt qualifications in Lean Six Sigma (an evolution of the Total Quality Management (TQM) paradigm from the 1970s and 1980s).

I earnt high grades during my Bachelor’s, so I went straight to doing a PhD in the Centre for Autonomous Systems (now Robotics Institute (RI)) with UTS. I worked on a project to develop an underwater robot for cleaning marine growth on submerged bridge piles, funded by the Roads & Maritime Services of NSW. My thesis focused on how to control a robot arm attached to a moving platform (such as a floating robot).

I then went on to do a postdoc with the Italian Institute of Technology, working with the Humanoid Sensing & Perception (HSP) team. I was part of the ergoCub humanoid robot project, funded by INAIL. My focus of research was bimanual grasping, as well as looking at how both humans and robots can optimise the configurations of their arms to enhance performance.

Currently I am with the Science & Technologies of Robotics in Medicine (STORM) lab, under the supervision of Prof. Pietro Valdastri. I am working on the Terabotics project in conjunction with the University of Warwick, and University of Exeter. The project is to embed terahertz sensing for cancer detection in to surgical robots. My focus is on how to control robot arms for contact sensing. Simultaneously, I am working on the modeling of soft, magnetised tentacle robots for surgical applications.

Here is a brief history of my education:

• 2007 – 2010: Certificate IV in Mechanical Trades, South-Western Sydney Institute of TAFE
• 2010 – 2015: B.E. Mechanical & Mechatronic Engineering, University of Technology Sydney
• 2015 – 2020: Doctor of Philosophy, University of Technology Sydney

And my work experience:

• 2007 – 2010: Maintenance Fitter, Precision Valve Australia
• 2011 – 2014: Engineering Scholar / Project Manager, Continuous Improvement Group, Sydney Trains
• 2015 – 2020: Doctoral candidate / engineer, University of Technology Sydney
• 2021 – 2023: Postoc, Humanoid Sensing & Perception group, Italian Institute of Technology
• 2024 – Present: Research Fellow, STORM Lab, University of Leeds

Responsibilities

• Control of Surgical Robots

Research interests

My interest is in robot control, with a particular focus on kinematically redundant robot arms. This involves utilizing the redundancy to optimise the control of the robot to enhance task performance, such as:

• Singularity avoidance,
• Joint torque minimisation,
• Stiffness & compliance, etc.

Stemming from this is my interest in both optimisation, and classical mechanics. This mostly involves quadratic programming (QP), in which I have written my own QP solver in C++. I am also interested in the calculus of varations for solving both physics and control problems. Currently, I am trying to model the bending of soft, magnetic tentacle robots under magnetic fields using this type of framework.

I have also done a bit of research on motion prediction, and predictive control. I combined these for controlling a robot arm on a moving platform.

My focus as a Postdoc is to explore more deeply on how principles in classical mechanics can better inform the design of robot control laws.

Qualifications

• Certificate IV in Mechanical Trades (Fitting & Machining)
• B.E. Mechanical & Mechatronic Engineering
• Doctor of Philosophy
• Lean Six Sigma Black Belt

Professional memberships

• Golden Key International Honor Society

Student education

Although I am not currently teaching in my role at the University of Leeds, I have over 7 years of teaching experience across my academic career, including:

• Developing lecture videos,
• Developing tutorials
• Writing online educational content, and
• Mentoring & supervising students.

As a PhD student, I helped develop the curriculum for the Introduction to Robotics subject (now Industrial Robotics) at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), alongside the subject coordinator Dr. Gavin Paul. Initially we started with 12 students, and we now have 200+. In the beginning I helped created lecture videos, as well as tutorial content involving mathematical exerices, and MATLAB programming for simulating robots. I still assist with the subject to this day, helping with Viva marking online for assignments.

I also had a role in teach and assessment for the Mechanical & Mechatronic Design subject at UTS led by Dr. Marc Carmichael. In this subject, students run engineering design projects for real world clients. I helped by developing lectures, mentoring students as a design / project manager, and marking assessments.

For the past 5 years I have also been a guest lecturer and teaching assistant for the Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt course on edX.org by the Technical University of Munich. This massively online open course (MOOC) has been completed by hundreds of thousands of students around the world, and was rated in one of the top 10 course of all time by Class Central.