Prof.Ali, an assistant professor at the Department of Biomechanical Engineering at the University of Twente and one of the tenure trackers of the 4TU Dutch Soft Robotics Program. After several years of working in the industry, he began his academic career as a lecturer and researcher at the Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Tehran (2004-2010), where he developed several service robots (e.g. power line pole climbing and domestic robots), as well as polymer micromachining facilities. His passion for soft robotics was born and grown at the Center for Micro-Bio Robotics of Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) where I worked from January 2010 to July 2019. During this period, he mainly focused on the design and unconventional manufacturing of soft-bodied robots, particularly inspired by biological models such as plants, sea urchin, and octopus. Inspired by plant movements, I pioneered the new concept of Growing Robots (robots moving and adapting by creating their own structure) and succeeded in inventing the world’s first examples of these robots by incorporating additive manufacturing technology as part of the robot structure.
