29 May 2026
Smarter Robot Bodies, one year on: notes from our annual gathering
From left to right: Michelle Lu, Nick Kellaris, and Zlatka Stoeva at ARIA’s Smarter Robot Bodies Creator Gathering.
Smarter Robot Bodies recently marked one year since Creators on its Robot Dexterity programme began work. We celebrated this at our annual Creator Gathering, convening our community of funded teams across both the programme and opportunity seeds, with many projects demoing the latest from their labs.
We caught up with PD Jenny Read, Science + Technology Lead Radhika Gudipati, and three Creators: Zlatka Stoeva (Co-founder of DZP Technologies), Michelle Lu (Co-founder of Vsim), and Nick Kellaris (Co-founder + Chief Research Officer of Artimus Robotics). Watch this space for a film straight from the gathering.
What is a Creator Gathering and what was the focus of this one?
Radhika: Creator Gatherings are a multi-day workshop in which we bring together our funded teams to showcase progress, facilitate cross-team collaboration, and hone in on how we can translate breakthroughs in the lab to real-world applications. We also invite guests from industry and government to get our teams thinking practically about commercialisation. It’s been one year since the Robot Dexterity programme kicked off, so this was a special moment to gather everyone in one place. We have multiple teams demonstrating their prototypes, and it’s exciting to see the progress they’ve made in just one year.
Jenny: The Robot Dexterity programme seeks to build a completely new industry with its home in the UK, so the focus of this Creator Gathering was translation. Deeptech journeys can be fraught with difficulty, but we’ve heard stories from guest speakers who’ve trodden this path before and they’ve shared invaluable advice, and given our teams a sense of why now is the time to collaborate and build in the UK.
Image: From left to right, ARIA CEO Kathleen Fisher, Michelle, and Radhika.
Zlatka, Nick, Michelle: what have you been working on over the past year?
Zlatka: We’re focused on enhancing tactile sensing in robots. DZP Technologies is a materials company, so we’re experts in new materials and building new sensors, so it’s been fulfilling to transfer our expertise to robotics. Our goal is to equip robots with tactile sensing akin to a human’s – essentially ensuring that robots can ‘feel’ the way a human can. In the last year, we’ve developed new materials, test rigs, data acquisition and analysis methodologies, and measurement and evaluation approaches. We can already see that we’re advancing the state-of-the-art quite significantly.
Nick: Artimus is working in partnership with the University of Bristol for our ARIA project. We’re aiming to develop and commercialise a new class of soft, artificial muscle called HASEL actuators. We use a combination of electrostatic and hydraulic forces to create very soft, resilient, high-force, silent actuators that we think can revolutionise robotics by creating a paradigm-shift from the electric motors that are widely used today.
"We’ve been able to demonstrate a 10x increase in the force output per weight of our standard actuators since the start of our project."
We’ve also integrated our actuators with a tendon-driven manipulator system with multiple degrees of freedom. Working with the team at Bristol, we’ve started creating the control and simulation framework, which means we can translate this into something that’s usable for real-world dexterous manipulation tasks.
Michelle: At Vsim, we build simulation technology and software solutions for robotics to accelerate research, reduce costs, and drive innovation. In our ARIA-funded work, we’ve built an extremely fast and highly accurate simulation platform and created a machine learning framework for it.
"Where it previously took hours to train a robot to perform a task, our platform allows us to do it in a matter of minutes."
We’ve been giving other Creators access to our platform, enabling multiple teams to more quickly and efficiently train their robots, essentially using AI to create next-generation dexterous manipulators.
What’s next for each of you?
Zlatka: We’ve already developed and tested multiple prototypes in the lab, so the next step is to put them in the hands of the user and test them in use-case scenarios. We’re also sharing our expertise on stretchable materials and conductive inks with other teams funded by the ARIA programme.
Nick: Having built a first dexterous manipulator using our artificial muscles, we want to drive further progress on the control and simulation framework with our collaborators at Bristol. We’re also working with ARIA Activation Partner Amodo Design to unblock some of the time-consuming manufacturing steps for the HASEL actuators.
Michelle: We’re already in the process of gathering feedback from other Creators on the Vsim platform, so we’ll be working with those teams directly to help them design and train their manipulators.
And Jenny, Radhika: what’s next for Smarter Robot Bodies?
Jenny: We’re about to launch a second programme, Robot Locomotion. We’re building on the signals that have come out of Robot Dexterity, particularly in the work we’ve funded on creating novel actuators. We think these breakthroughs could be crucial for unlocking radically more dexterous robots, but we’ve realised they also have potentially huge applications in locomotion.
Image: Jenny participating in a demo of Vsim’s simulation platform.
Radhika: Over the past year, we’ve observed a major issue around lack of efficiency in robot locomotion. Put simply, the energy and power that robots use to move around real-world environments is far higher than it needs to be – for example, a lot is wasted as heat – and this is a bottleneck for advancing robotics.
Jenny: That’s exactly right. We want to unlock robots that can move from A to B over rough, uneven ground, bump into things, not get damaged by stumbling over terrain, and do all of this more efficiently so that they can work for hours, rather than needing to frequently recharge or swap batteries.
"Ultimately, we feel passionate about building a next-generation robotics industry in the UK; as our society increasingly deploys robots, whether in construction or infrastructure maintenance, or recycling or caring for the environment, we want to have a homegrown industry that can meet those needs."
Jenny Read
Programme Director, Smarter Robot Bodies