Dr. Xianwen Kong is an ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) Fellow, an Associate Professor in the Institute of Mechanical, Process and Energy Engineering, School of Engineering and Physical Sciences, Heriot-Watt University, and a member of the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics. He has authored or co-authored one monograph (with Prof C. Gosselin) published in English by Springer in 2007, two U.S. patents and more than 200 publications in journals and conference proceedings and has secured several funds on multi-mode parallel robots and reconfigurable manufacturing systems from EPSRC and Innovate UK. The Russian translation and Chinese translation of the monograph were published by the Russian publisher FIZMATLIT – Nauka Publishers and the China Machine Press in 2012 and 2013 respectively.

Dr. Kong received several awards including the 2012 ASME Freudenstein/General Motors Young Investigator Award, the 2020 ASME A.T. Yang Memorial Award in Theoretical Kinematics and the 2024 ASME Leonardo Da Vinci Award. He served as the Programme Chair/Co-chair for the ASME/IEEE ReMAR in 2009 and 2012 and for the ASME IDETC 2016 and 2018. He is an associate editor for Mechanism and Machine Theory, IEEE IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), ASME Journal of Mechanisms and Robots, and Chinese Journal of Mechanical Engineering and an elected member of the ASME Technical Committee on Mechanisms and Robotics.

Dr Kong's research interests include mechanisms, robotics and mechatronics focusing on the creative design of parallel robots and reconfigurable robots with their applications in advanced manufacturing, renewable energy and biomedical applications. He developed a systematic approach to the creative design of parallel manipulators and compliant parallel manipulators and initiated the research on disassembly-free reconfigurable parallel manipulators.

Dr Kong's current research projects include: 

1. Developing Machine Learning-empowered Responsive Manufacture Of Industrial Laser Systems (EPSRC EP/V051164/1, Dec 2021-July 2025) (Co-I)  

2. A multiscale digital twin-driven smart manufacturing system for high value-added products (EP/T024844/1): Work package 4, EPSRC, May 2020-April 2025 (HWU-PI)