Thanathorn Phoka

Chulalongkorn University, Naresuan University

Papers

Total Citations

134

H-Index

About

Thanathorn Phoka is a robotics researcher whose work bridges the critical gap between perception and action in autonomous systems. His primary research areas include robotic grasping, computer vision, and educational technology. Phoka’s most influential contribution, “Grasping novel objects with depth segmentation” (2010), has garnered 129 citations and addresses the fundamental challenge of enabling robots to interact with unfamiliar environments. In this work, he demonstrated that the complex task of grasping novel objects from cluttered scenes could be significantly simplified using depth-based segmentation, offering a more efficient alternative to computationally expensive machine learning approaches. This practical insight has informed subsequent work in robotic manipulation and service robotics. More recently, Phoka has turned his attention to educational robotics with the development of “Arducation Bot,” a pedagogical platform combining tangible robotics with mobile applications to teach computational thinking. This work reflects his commitment to making robotics and programming more accessible, particularly for novice learners. By developing intuitive, low-cost tools, Phoka is helping to democratize robotics education and cultivate the next generation of engineers and computational thinkers.