MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Contacts with Dynamically Tunable Adhesion and Friction via Active Materials with Thermally Modulated Stiffness”

Room 337, Towne Building 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Contact interactions, including adhesion and friction, are critical to the design of many engineered systems. Currently, most systems rely on materials with static mechanical properties, requiring careful selection of materials […]

MSE Seminar: “Materials, Mechanics, and Performance of Flexible Polymeric Actuators in Robotics” (Sameh Tawfick – University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)

Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

My group is developing a roadmap for soft actuating materials to replace bulky electric motors in miniature robots requiring large mechanical work output. First, I will describe the materials microstructure and […]

CIS Seminar: “Learning Controllers for multi-robot Teams”

Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

We have recently demonstrated the possibility of learning controllers that are zero-shot transferable to groups of real quadrotors via large-scale, multi-agent, end-to-end reinforcement learning. We train policies parameterized by neural […]

ASSET & Warren Center Research Mixer

Glandt Forum, Singh Center for Nanotechnology 3205 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

The ASSET and Warren Center will be hosting a research mixer to welcome new PhD students and expose new and current students to the wide range of research in Penn […]

PICS Colloquium: Motion-based rules and solitary waves: ameloblasts and birds

PICS Conference Room 534 - A Wing , 5th Floor 3401 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Information is usually expected to propagate across a population of active agents such as living cells or birds in a diffusive manner. Yet waviness in the microstructure of dental enamel […]

ESE Fall Seminar – “Beyond the Exit of the Device Miniaturization Tunnel”

Raisler Lounge (Room 225), Towne Building 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

For the past fifty years, researchers of semiconductor technology have felt like walking inside a tunnel. There was a single path forward – two-dimensional down-scaling of device sizes, also referred […]