Boyko Stoimenov - Research

Co-workers (alphabetically)

Research is more productive when ideas are exchanged and cross-fertilized. I've been working with different people, who have influenced my approach to certain problems and this list is a credit to them.

Koshi Adachi (足立 幸志) is Associate Professor at Tohoku University. He is an expert in Tribology, especially wear of ceramics. He is very energetic and we had a lot of fun doing research on frictional sound. I really admired his ability to always come with a good story explaining the data, and new ways of viewing data that I thought was ultimately useless.

Kinji Asaka （安積 欣志） is the Group Leader of the Artificial cell research group at the Research Institute for Cell Engineering (RICE) at AIST in Osaka. He is an expert of soft polymer actuators and together with Dr. Oguro can be credited for the creation of one of the first IPMC (ionic polymer metal composites) actuators and the development of the gold-plating process. He has been providing a great help and advice on manufacturing of soft actuators.

Norihiro Kamamichi (釜道 紀浩) is currently a Research Associate at the Department of Robots and Mechatronics at Tokyo Denki University. He is a control theory wizard and has extensive experience in controlling those wiggling soft polymer actuators.

Koji Kato (加藤 康司) is Professor of Tribology at Nihon University and Professor Emeritus of Tohoku University. He is currently the President of the Japanese Society of Tribologists (JAST). He was the supervisor of my Ph.D. thesis at Tohoku University and I owe him a great deal. He is a very skilful presenter and research manager.

Suguru Maruyama (丸山 卓) did a fine work on frictional sound experiments. In some of our papers, photographs of his hands rubbing two metal plate specimens can be seen. He was a master of repeatable testing and I am sure Toyota cars run better, because of his work at the company. He was a very energetic and positive person and will be missed by many.

Toshiharu Mukai (向井 利春) is the Sensor Team Leader at the Bio-mimetic Control Research Center and my current boss. His expertise is in the field of machine vision and tactile sensing, and his wider interests include sensor information processing, robotics, and artificial muscles. He is creating an excellent research environment and is one of the prime movers behind the RIMAN robot.

Yoshihiro Nakabo (中坊 嘉宏) currently works at the Intelligent Systems Research Institute at AIST.He was the first to make an undulatory swimming robot from a patterned IPMC artificial muscle actuator. His insights in undulatory locomotion are always a welcome addition to any paper on the subject.His background is in the area of machine vision.

Jonathan Rossiter is currently a Royal Society Research Fellow at the University of Bristol. His main field is Artificial Intelligence, but we did some very exciting work with him on Artificial Muscles. He is very active, with lots of fresh ideas and a wide area of expertise. I've been amazed by the speed he does circuit board design and implements it.

Michita Sugawara (菅原 道太) is currently working for Hitachi. He was my student at Tohoku University and did an excellent job of running an incredible amount of wear tests to clarify the effects of wear on frictional sound.

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