Abstract:
Currently deployed robots are primarily rigid machines that perform repetitive, controlled tasks in highly constrained or open environments such as factory floors, warehouses, or fields. There is an increasing demand for more adaptable, mobile, and flexible robots that can manipulate or move through unstructured and dynamic environments. My vision is to create robots that can mechanically conform to the environment or objects that they interact with to alleviate the need for high-speed, high-accuracy, and high-precision sensing and control algorithms. The design of novel conformable mechanisms can enhance next-generation manipulators (i.e., to enable safe, strong, and dexterous interactions with both humans and objects), multi-robot systems (i.e.,  to navigate through uneven surfaces and obstacles), and small-scale systems (i.e., to simplify control and sensing suites to meet the necessary mass and power requirements).

In this presentation, I will talk about the ongoing projects in my lab including reconfigurable robots, heterogeneous robot systems, dexterous manipulation, and dynamic folding/unfolding.