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About

Nantachai Sornkarn is a leading researcher in soft robotics and embodied perception, whose work bridges biological principles and robotic design to enhance haptic sensing and locomotion. His key research areas include morphological computation, impedance control, and bio-inspired tactile perception. Sornkarn’s major contributions center on understanding how stiffness regulation—both in robotic probes and biological systems—improves haptic information gain. His most cited work (32 citations) reveals how soft robotic probes can mimic human finger stiffness control to more effectively locate hard nodules in soft tissues, a breakthrough with implications for medical palpation and teleoperation. He further demonstrated that internal impedance control is critical for embodied perception, showing that robots can achieve greater accuracy by modulating their own mechanical properties during probing. Sornkarn’s interdisciplinary approach extends to animal locomotion, where his analysis of goat hoof morphology (22 citations) provided the first analytical explanation of slip reduction on unstructured terrain. He also developed a biologically inspired multimodal whisker follicle for texture classification. With over 125 citations across his top papers, Sornkarn’s work is foundational for designing robots that perceive and interact with the world more like living organisms.