Soft Robotics Podcast

Clip: Cynthia Sung "How To Design An Inherent Controller Using Geometric Nonlinearities?"

Here is my conversation with Su Ryon Shin the head of Shin Lab at Harvard Medical School Brigham and Women's Hospital about muscle regeneration, multi-material embedded bio-printing, bio-hybrid actuator. I hope you enjoy listening.

Soft Robotics With Metin Sitti by Marwa ElDiwiny

Bio:

Cynthia’s interests focus on computational methods for design automation of robotic systems. Robots integrate mechanical, electronic, and computational subsystems into physical devices that perform complex tasks ranging from autonomous navigation and manipulation to cooperative and social interactions. Cynthia aims to provide designers with intuitive computer-aided design tools for creating customized robots and behaviors. Her work involves developing techniques for representing, modeling, simulating, and fabricating these designs. Cynthia’s research lies at the intersection of computational geometry, data driven methods, and rapid fabrication techniques such as 3D printing and origami-inspired assembly.

Soft Robots with embedded sensing, actuation, computation, and adapting their physical properties for changing requirements.

Bio:

Nikolaus is an associate professor at the Department of Computer Science with courtesy appointments at the Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering and the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He obtained a PhD from EPFL advised by Alcherio Martinoli in 2007, and spent two years at MIT CSAIL working with Daniela Rus as a post-doc. Before moving to EPFL, Nikolaus was a research assistant in the Collective Robotics Group at Caltech in 2003, also with Alcherio Martinoli. Nikolaus earned a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zürich) in spring 2003. He wrote his master’s thesis at the Collective Robotics Group at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA, about collaborative coverage supervised by Alcherio Martinoli and Joel Burdick, and spent a term at Lunds Tekniska Högskola (Lund Institute of Technology, Sweden) as an exchange student at the Department of Automatic Control working with Rolf Johansson in 2002. Before moving to ETH Zuerich in 2000, Nikolaus studied electrical engineering at the Technical University of Munich from 1998.

Robert Wood: Unavoidable trade-offs: Low Contact Force Interaction vs Precision, Speed, And Easy To Use & How To Select The Proper Materials That Performs In Interesting Way.

Robert Wood “What Is Still Hard To Understand For Bio-Inspired And Biomimicry Design"

Robert Wood: The goal isn't publications, the goal is basic science and deep understanding

Robert Wood: How do you calculate power usage in flexible robotics? Is it electrical, pneumatic, hydraulic or some combination? How do you Simulate flexible robotics reliably? Can standard simulators work?

Bio:

Robert Wood is the Charles River Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences in the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, an Associate Faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, and a National Geographic Explorer. Prof. Wood completed his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in the Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. He is founder of the Harvard Microrobotics Lab which leverages expertise in microfabrication for the development of biologically-inspired robots with feature sizes on the micrometer to centimeter scale. He is the winner of multiple awards for his work including the DARPA Young Faculty Award, NSF Career Award, ONR Young Investigator Award, Air Force Young Investigator Award, Technology Review’s TR35, and multiple best paper awards. In 2010 Wood received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from President Obama for his work in microrobotics. In 2012 he was selected for the Alan T. Waterman award, the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious early career award. In 2014 he was named one of National Geographic’s “Emerging Explorers”. Wood’s group is also dedicated to STEM education by using novel robots to motivate young students to pursue careers in science and engineering.