Rate My Professor Lei Cui

Dr. Lei Cui serves as Senior Lecturer in Mechatronics and Discipline Lead for the Mechatronic Engineering Major in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, School of Civil and Mechanical Engineering at Curtin University, Perth, Australia. He is also the Head of the Biorobotics Research Lab. Cui obtained his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the Centre for Robotics Research at King’s College London in July 2010. Subsequently, he held a Postdoctoral Research Associate position at the same centre from July 2010 to February 2011. He then moved to the United States as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, from February 2011 to July 2012. In July 2012, he joined Curtin University as Lecturer in Mechatronics, progressing to his current senior role.

Cui's research interests encompass robotics, mechatronics, biomechanics, rehabilitation engineering, and biomimetic designs for environmental monitoring. Key projects include the 3D printable parametric hand exoskeleton for finger rehabilitation, which secured the Overall Winner title at the 2015 Curtin University Commercial Innovation Awards; ComBot, a compact robot for upper-limb rehabilitation using EMG and force sensing for adaptive control; a 3-DOF robotic platform for studying multi-directional stance perturbations to prevent falls in the elderly; Curtin Robotic Fish, achieving a world-record speed of three body lengths per second for untethered robotic fish; and AmBot, an amphibious centipede-inspired robot for estuary monitoring. His work has resulted in patented finger designs and collaborations with industry and health experts. Cui has published 42 peer-reviewed papers, garnering over 1,012 citations. Notable publications include "Design and Development of An Instrumented Knee Joint for Quantifying Ligament Displacements" (2021), "Optimal robot-environment interaction using inverse differential Riccati equation" (2019), "Neural Impedance Adaption for Assistive Human-Robot Interaction" (2018), and "A Simulation-Based Study on a Clutch-Spring Mechanism Reducing Human Walking Metabolic Cost" (2018).