Kang Li, recipient Aalt Dijkhuizen Fund Scholarship 2023

"I had never thought that I would win this prize. I googled the name of the last winner and found out that he got a lot of publications, while I have no publications. But I thought: Why not just give it a try? And I submitted it at the deadline day. It was a very big surprise for me to have won this."

"I had two courses named biomimetics and software robotics and after that I did my thesis on bioinspired earthworm robots. When I went into detail about this project, I saw that there were many areas that still needed to be explored, so this will probably be a project that I can do for a life-long time. For my MSc scholarship, I went to the soil mechanics group in SLU Sweden for 3 months to do simulation and soil penetrometer experiments about earthworm burrows. If I wouldn't have gotten this price, I would have tried to design some simple experiments. But now that I got this scholarship, I can use more and better devices like X-ray MRI in my experiments."

"If you want to have a robotic earthworm model, you need much more research. For example, in my thesis I only designed the intestine part of the earthworm. There are also other parts like the mouth that need to be researched, with respect to how they take a bite of soil. There's still a lot of things that need to be done and learned in earthworm morphology. Things like how they burrow into the soil and how we can get inspired from it to solve our agricultural problems. This can be done on, for instance, the subject of soil compaction. It is a very complex project and I am willing to accept challenges. I also want to do a PhD to continue this research, to design earthworm-inspired robots to support to the research of our agriculture. As the project is related to soil mechanics, I am very happy to learn from fellow colleagues that study soil and broaden my horizons."

"I think I am very lucky that I can have this opportunity to fix my economic problems, so I can focus more on the research. That is very meaningful for young researchers and students like me. Because of this fund, I don’t need to worry about my finances anymore. I can focus on my research and also, during that, I can try to find other future opportunities as well.

I am very grateful for my donors and Aalt Dijkhuizen's idea about raising this fund and I'm very happy to be a part of it. I think this fund gives me a unique chance to be a model that someone else can look up to. So it also means that I have a huge responsibility now and I am very happy to take this responsibility. Thanks to the Dr. ir. Aalt Dijkhuizen Fund, I can reach out to soil scientists from Sweden and Switzerland to share ideas and design agricultural robots better. Thanks to the Fund I can now conduct more experiments to explore further what we can learn from the earthworm."