Biography: Professor Shane (Sheng Quan) Xie has over 30 years of research experience in the field of robotics and exoskeletons. He is currently a Chair Professor of Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Director of the Mechatronics and Robotics programme and Director of the Rehabilitation Robotics Lab at the University of Leeds, and was previously the Director of the Rehabilitation and Medical Robotics Centre at the University of Auckland. He has published > 450 refereed papers and 8 books in rehabilitation exoskeleton design and control, neuromuscular modelling, and advanced human-robot interaction. He established the world-first Masters programme in Medical Devices and Technologies in 2010 involving 10 medical devices companies and researchers from both engineering and medical fields. He was a Technical Editor for the IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics and is the editor-in-chief for the International journal of Biomechatronics and Biomedical Robotics. He led many government funded research projects as principle investigator and has completed over 50 funded research projects totalling over £30M of research contracts from government granting agencies and industries. He has had over 15 post docs, 60 PhDs and 80 postgraduate students and his team has invented three award-winning rehabilitation exoskeletons and developed iterative learning algorithms for exoskeletons to interact with patients. He has conducted extensive clinical studies of robot-assisted rehabilitation on stroke patients, and has strong links with clinical, industry and research affiliates in the medical space and world leading hospitals throughout NZ, Asia, US and Europe. He is an elected Fellow of Engineering New Zealand, Fellow of IEEE, ASME and the Institution of Mechanical Engineers UK.

Biography: Ivan Petrović is a full professor at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb, Croatia, where he heads the Laboratory for Autonomous Systems and Mobile Robotics – LAMOR (http://lamor.fer.hr). He is also co-director of the National Center of Research Excellence for Data Science and Advanced Cooperative Systems. His research has focused on various aspects of automatic control, state estimation, and machine learning and their application in the control of complex engineering systems for about forty years, with robot and vehicle autonomy and human-robot interaction being among his major research interests over the past twenty-five years. He has published over 80 papers in scientific journals and 220 papers in proceedings of international conferences. He has actively participated as collaborator or principal investigator in about 80 research and development projects at national and EU level. The results of his research work have been implemented in several industrial products. He is an active member of national and international professional societies. Among others, he is a fellow of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, a full member of the Croatian Academy of Engineering, a council member of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), a permanent board member of the European Conference on Mobile Robots and the International Conference on Robotics in Alpe-Adria-Danube Region and a member of the Governing Board of the Intelligent Autonomous Systems (IAS) Society. He is editor-in-chief of the Elsevier journal Robotics and Autonomous Systems and the T&F journal Automatika and an associate editor of the Elsevier journal Mechatronics.