Name: Dr Chapa Hewa Pelendage

Academic Division: Civil Engineering

Research Group:  Bio-Inspired Robotics Lab

Fellowship period: 15 June 2023 – 14 June 2026

Dr Chapa Sirithunge received her bachelor’s and PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. During her PhD, she developed cognitive frameworks for socially interactive robots in domestic and social domains. Upon graduation, she joined the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Moratuwa as a visiting lecturer in 2020. She then served as a lecturer at the Sri Lanka Technological Campus until she joined the University of Cambridge as a postdoctoral researcher. She was a member of the Bio-inspired Robotics lab where she explored how soft robotics could be used in human-robot interaction and in 2023 she won the prestigious Marie Curie FutureRoads fellowship to continue her research in Robotics in a Civil Engineering domain to improve roads in the future. In the FutureRoads project, she is developing a multi-agent system based on sensor fusion to improve the safety of heavy machines and workers. She further develops simulations to represent situation-aware human-machine collaborative systems in this context. Her research interests include bio-inspired robots, cognitive robotics, soft robots, and collaborative AI.