Team Imperial

Team Captain
Professor Aldo Faisal

Professor in Neurotechnology jointly at the Department of Bioengineering and the Department of Computing at Imperial College London. Aldo is the Team Leader over-seeing the overall development as well as leading projects such as the vision controlled wheelchair, brain computer interface and powered arm prosthesis development.

Team Leader - Functional Electrical simulation (FES)
Mr Nat Wannawas

Nat is a first year PhD student and is working on developing functional electrical stimulation (FES) controllers for FES cycling using deep reinforcement learning. His main research goal is to build the controller that automatically tunes its parameters and learns to deal with muscle conditions.

Team Leader - Powered Wheelchair 
Mr Mahendran Subramanian

EPSRC research scholar (PhD - III year), Toyota Discovery challenge co-awardee and active research professional.  Mahendran’s research focuses on combining eye-tracking/ gaze-contingent intention decoding with computer vision context-aware algorithms and autonomous navigation drawn from self- driving vehicles to allow paralysed users to drive-by eye, simply by decoding natural gaze about where the user wants to go: A.Eye Drive. The resulting “Zero UI” driving platform should allow users to look and interact visually with at an object or destination of interest in their visual scene, and the wheelchair autonomously takes the user to the intended destination, while continuously updating the computed path for static and dynamic obstacles. 

Team Leader - Powered Arm Prosthesis
Ms Irene Mendez

Irene is a PhD student at the Institute for Biomedical Engineering (IBME).  For the powered arm prosthesis race, the prosthetic hand, fully developed by the team in the last year, enables natural control of the fingers and the wrist with sensory feedback to close the loop between the user and the prosthesis.

Technical team:

• Patrick Sagastegui (PhD student at the Department of Bioengineering)
• Jumpei Kashiwakura (Research assistant at the Department of Bioengineering)

Team leader
Dr Aldo Faisal

Senior Lecturer in Neurotechnology jointly at the Department of Bioengineering and the Department of Computing at Imperial College London. Aldo is the Team Leader over-seeing the overall development as well as leading projects such as the vision controlled wheelchair, brain computer interface and powered arm prosthesis development.

Project leader
Dr Spyros Masouros

Lecturer in Trauma Biomechanics in the Department of Bioengineering and the Biomechanics Theme Lead for the Royal British Legion Centre for Blast Injuries Studies. Spyros is leading developments on the powered wheelchair project.

Leader of the joint "BerkelBike UK - Team Imperial" entry into the FES bike race
Rik Berkelmans

The BerkelBike is a bicyle and functional electrical technology (FES) solution for a spinal cord injured. The patented technology and the company are the brainchild of Rik Berkelmans.

Team co-ordinator
Dr Ian Radcliffe

Project Manager on the Sports Innovation Challenge. Ian assists in the organisation of the team and pilots and interaction with the media.

Technical co-ordinator
Charalambos "Harris" Konnaris

Having completed a BEng in Mechanical Engineering and a Masters in Bioengineering, Harris is currently working towards a PhD in the Department of Bioengineering, with the intent of delivering high impact technologies for people with disabilities. Currently Harris designs and builds novel neuroprosthesis in the Brain and Behaviour lab in the Dept. of Bioengineering.  His goal is to replicate the human hand’s dexterity and precision in an affordable and functional prosthesis.

Project advisor
Professor Etienne Burdet

Professor of Human Robotics within the Department of Bioengineering, Etienne’s main interests are in human-machine interaction and rehabilitation robotics.