I study how humans and machines exchange information through the body - how movement intent can be read out of muscle activity, and how touch can be delivered back.
The through-line is infrastructure rather than one-off demonstrations: instruments that other labs can build, trust, and cite. Postdoc at Imperial College London, PhD in bioengineering, working across haptics, tactile sensing, and biosignal acquisition.
Active projects and collaborations with research groups.
A backpack that gives you two extra robotic arms - first as a demo you could wear for hours, now as a research platform for studying how people work with limbs they can't see.
A bioinspired electronic skin with layered sensing for robotics, prosthetics, and haptic applications.
Peer-reviewed work in haptics, tactile sensing, and human-robot interaction.
Xuanyun Qiu, Dorian Verdel, Hector Cervantes-Culebro, Alexis W.M. Devillard, Etienne Burdet
A hierarchical framework for maintaining balance when humans are augmented with supernumerary robotic limbs, featuring prediction, planning, and control layers tested with ten participants performing bending tasks.
Anirvan Dutta, Alexis W.M. Devillard, Zhihua Zhang, Xiaoxiao Cheng, Etienne Burdet
Investigating how sensing embodiment affects tactile perception using a modular e-Skin with interchangeable mechanical compliance and an unsupervised, action-conditioned deep state-space model to interpret soft object properties.
Alexis W.M. Devillard, Aruna Ramasamy, Xiaoxiao Cheng, Damien Faux, Etienne Burdet
A comprehensive multi-modal dataset capturing concurrent haptic, audio, and visual signals from participants interacting with textured surfaces, addressing gaps in human tactile exploration research.
Henrik Jörntell, Alexis W.M. Devillard, Etienne Burdet
Examining mechanical spatiotemporal invariants emerging from skin-body-environment interactions and corresponding neural mechanisms, with applications to robotics.
Alexis W.M. Devillard, Anirvan Dutta, Zhihuan Zhang, Xiaoxiao Cheng, Etienne Burdet
A bioinspired electronic skin with layered sensing architecture for robotics, prosthetics, and haptic applications.
Jenireth Torrealba Molina, Toqa AbuBaker, Alexis W.M. Devillard, Yanpei Huang, Xiaoxiao Cheng, Etienne Burdet
A modular robotic platform designed and evaluated for precision microsurgical applications.
Alexis W.M. Devillard, Luca Mattioli, Etienne Burdet
Exploring multi-sensory integration approaches for sensory augmentation in virtual and robotic interaction scenarios.
Alexis W.M. Devillard, Aruna Ramasamy, Damien Faux, Vincent Hayward, Etienne Burdet
The conference presentation of the multi-modal tactile exploration dataset, later extended in Nature Scientific Data.
MSc and MEng projects at Imperial College London, mostly built on the open platforms I maintain - so the work outlasts the academic year.
Currently no open projects.
New topics are usually listed ahead of the academic year. If you have a strong idea in haptics, biosignals, or wearable robotics, get in touch anyway.
Building a piezo-driven fingertip haptic device and characterising it properly - electromechanically first, then perceptually - before asking whether it can render texture.
Cueing note identity, hand assignment, and onset timing through nail-mounted vibrotactile actuators - leaving the fingerpad free to feel the key.
Electronic skin research stalls at the electronics, not the sensors. This project defines a scalable reference architecture covering bandwidth, synchronisation, calibration, and power.
Embedding EMG and IMU sensors into backpack straps to decode continuous 3-DOF shoulder velocity, with biomechanical priors built into the loss function to survive data-scarce, non-stationary conditions.
Predicting what the wearer is about to do from vision alone, so a supernumerary robotic limb can assist without being explicitly commanded.
Open to research collaborations, joint student projects, and labs wanting to build on the CleverHand platform. Get in touch.