DrDipankar Bhattacharya

Dr Dipankar Bhattacharya is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Dyson School of Design Engineering, Imperial College London. He leads CASREx, a cable-driven soft reconfigurable exosuit for rehabilitation after muscle impairment, designed to learn and reproduce how healthy adults regulate arm stiffness during everyday movements.

His current research addresses a fundamental challenge in post-stroke rehabilitation: restoring the body’s ability to stabilise movement when disturbed. For example, when carrying a cup of coffee and being bumped, a healthy nervous system automatically adjusts muscle activity and elbow stiffness to keep the cup steady. After stroke, this automatic regulation can be impaired, causing the arm to shake or wobble even when the person can still reach. Dr Bhattacharya’s work combines muscle recordings, digital twins of the human arm, and learning-based control to develop a soft robotic sleeve that can gently support the joint and help users remain stable during daily tasks such as carrying a cup, holding a tool, or resisting external disturbances.

He specialises in robotic systems that integrate learning algorithms with physics-based modelling for accurate, robust control. He obtained his PhD in Mechatronics Engineering from the University of Auckland in 2021 and has published in leading journals including IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, Mechanism and Machine Theory, and Soft Robotics. His research has received the Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Robotic Intelligence Technology and Applications, and his recent work on cable-driven soft exosuit control has been accepted at IEEE IROS 2026.

Before joining Imperial, Dr Bhattacharya was a Senior Research Engineer at the Center for Transformative Garment Production and a Visiting Research Associate at the University of Hong Kong, where he developed robotic fabric manipulation methods for transforming randomly wrinkled fabrics into target shapes. This work combined imitation learning, visual servoing, and mesh-based Transformer models for precise and generalisable dual-arm manipulation of deformable materials.

He also held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, working on modelling, control, and optimisation of cable-driven robotic systems, including cable-driven bionic arms, superlimbs, inflatable growing robots, and bio-inspired soft pneumatic robots.

Dr Bhattacharya’s research spans robotic manipulation, soft robotics, cable-driven parallel robots, and intelligent control. His broader goal is to bridge model-based control and data-driven learning to create next-generation robots capable of operating in deformable, uncertain, and complex environments, while translating this science into assistive technologies that help stroke survivors recover movement stability and functional independence.