The Soft NeuroBionics Lab (SNBLab) aims to develop cutting-edge technology for functional movement assistance, augmentation, and rehabilitation using soft wearable robotics and advanced neurotechnologies. We are dedicated to understanding how soft materials and lightweight actuation strategies, combined with advanced neurocontrols, can best support human motion and activities, advancing the field of wearables. 

Wearable robotics, whether through traditional rigid exoskeletons or innovative soft exosuits, poses significant challenges due to the intricate interaction with the human body. Despite promising preliminary results, current technologies are still a long way from being ready for everyday use. However, we firmly believe that these robots will play a pivotal role in our future, helping people, reducing injuries, improving recovery, enhancing abilities, monitoring body parameters, enabling early diagnosis of potential diseases, efficiently compensating for physical disabilities, restoring lost abilities, and even assisting with everyday tasks at home to make life easier. 

Despite inherently reduced support capability compared to their rigid counterparts, soft wearables have the potential to effectively complement traditional rigid wearable robotics, enhancing overall functionality, comfort, long-term usage, and flexibility in human-machine interactions.

Our research efforts at SNBLab are primarily focused on investigating various aspects of physical human-robot interaction. These include:

• Designing novel solutions to support human movements.
• Intelligently sharing control between human users and robots.
• Detecting and anticipating user movement intentions.
• Adapting robot behavior to different applications and contexts.
• Collecting meaningful data from human-robot interactions.

We prioritize solutions that can have a tangible impact on people and can be effectively implemented beyond the academic environment. Consequently, our lab considers factors such as cost-efficiency (e.g., underactuation and minimal sensor requirements), robustness (testing unsupervised user behaviors in real-world environments), and demonstrable usefulness (e.g., investigating both the effects of a technology and appropriate assessment methodologies).

If you are interested in our activities or in joining the lab, please do not hesitate to contact us by email!

For a full list of publications, please click here.

Consider joining the lab for your thesis, look here for the availability