Prof. Dr. Ing. Julia Starke

Short Biography

since December 2024: assistant professor at the Institute of Robotics and Cognitive Systems at the University of Lübeck

October 2022 to November 2024: postdoctoral researcher at the High Performance Humanoid Technologies Lab at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology on the development of humanoid hands for assistive robots in elderly care and rehabilitation

July 2017 to September 2022: PhD student at the High Performance Humanoid Technologies Lab at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in the area of intelligent prosthetic hands

January 2017 to June 2017: research assistant at the Continuum Robotics Lab at Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz University Hanover on actuation and control of tendon-driven and tubular continuum robots

Research Interests

My research is focused on robots interacting with the environment and with humans. I specifically focus on grasping and manipulation with robotic hands. This includes the hardware design of robotic and prosthetic hands, human motion analysis and robotic grasp control inspired by human control strategies and the autonomous and cooperative control of grasping and manipulation actions. I am interested in both hands and grippers for robots as well as wearable robotic hands, that are used as prosthesis or exoskeleton. In order to achieve versatile, adaptable and robust hand control, I try to understand the manipulation strategies used by humans and transfer them to robotic hands. In addition, I work on semi-autonomous control strategies that include the human as the wearer or operator of a robotic hand. By these means, I aim to tackle complex tasks, that cannot yet be solved by autonomous robots and keep the human in control in interactive or safety-critical tasks.