Abstract: More and more robots of the future will be soft. A soft body can absorb impact forces from collisions with obstacles, making robots suitable for unpredictable environments and safe for human-robot interaction. However, widespread application of soft robotics in daily life, business, and consumer products have not yet been achieved, because established robotic technologies, such as fabrication, perception, planning, and control, cannot directly adapt to the soft robotic system, due to the lack of understanding of soft material physical properties and its benefit to human daily life.
To address these challenges, my current work spans three main applications: Search and Rescue, Manipulation, and Haptics. My talk introduces three different projects: 1. “Pressure-operated Soft Robotic Snake” creates soft, snake-like robots that can navigate through real-world environments with confined spaces, fragile objects, clutter, rough, or granular surfaces. 2. “A Teleoperated, Growing, Compact, Soft, Precise Manipulator” details a new soft manipulator, derived from the soft vine robot in Prof. Okamura’s lab. This robot will have flexible steering, the ability to grow and retract from the tip, easy mounting due to its small size, and the ability to precisely manipulate objects. 3. “Soft wearable haptic devices with normal and shear display. ” investigates the human forearm’s perception by soft robotic technology, which can be used in haptic communication.

Bio: Ming Luo received a BS degree from Tian Jin Polytechnic University ECE department in 2010, China, a MS degree from Southeastern Louisiana University Integrated Science and Technology Program in 2012, and a PhD degree from Worcester Polytechnic Institute Robotics Engineering Program supervised by Prof. CagdasD. Onalin2017. He is currently a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Stanford University supervised by Prof. Allison Okarmua. His academic interests include soft robotics, snake robot, origami robot, and haptics. His paper made the cover of Bioinspiration& Biomimetics-Special issue on Bioinspired Soft Robotics and was selected as one of the Bioinspiration& BiomimeticsHighlights of 2015. His soft snake robot won first place in the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2017 soft robot speed challenge. His work is also featured by IEEE Xplore, REUTRES and The Verge.

Homepage: http://web.stanford.edu/~mingluo/