MEAM Seminar: “Real-Time Safe and Energy-Efficient UAV Motion Planning in Windy Urban Environments”

Towne 319 220 S. 33rd Street, Philadelphia, United States

Recent advancements in hardware and software are bringing autonomous aerial vehicles closer than ever to finally delivering on futuristic visions of flying cars and package delivery drones. However, the safe deployment of autonomous aircraft at scale in urban environments poses significant challenges, one of which being uncertainties contributed by complex spatial and temporal winds. Clusters […]

MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Leveraging Impedance-Related Properties for Free Self-Sensing in Actuators for Compact Robots”

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

Robotic systems, particularly at small scales, require efficient actuation and sensing solutions that maintain compactness. We are interested in systems where sensing and actuation are seamlessly integrated, specifically using impedance-related properties—such as electrical resistance, induced electromotive force (emf), and inductance— for free self-sensing in actuators without additional sensors. We explore three main example applications: (1) […]

MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Macroscopic Ensemble Methods for Multi Robot Task Assignment in Dynamic Environments”

Levine 307 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

With finite resources to complete tasks like monitoring, coverage, and search, the challenge lies in identifying and performing tasks that can change both in frequency and location. One potential solution is teams of robots equipped with the necessary capabilities to complete the desired tasks. However, robot teams require methods that effectively assign robots to tasks, […]

MEAM Master’s Thesis Defense: “Investigating Jet Interactions in the Multi-Jet SALP Robot”

David Rittenhouse Laboratory Building, Room 4E19 209 S. 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Jet propulsion is a common locomotion strategy in nature. We developed an underwater particle image velocimetry (PIV) system to investigate the hydrodynamic effects of the SALP (Salp-inspired Approach to Low-energy Propulsion) robot, a soft underwater robot that swims using jet propulsion. Multiple SALP units can be physically connected to form a multi-SALP system, coordinating their […]

MEAM Master’s Thesis Defense: “Learning a Vision-Based Footstep Planner for Hierarchical Walking Control on Unstructured Terrain”

David Rittenhouse Laboratory Building, Room 4C4 209 S. 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Bipedal robots demonstrate high potential in navigating challenging terrains through dynamic ground contact. However, current frameworks often depend solely on proprioception or use manually designed visual processing pipelines, which are fragile in real-world settings and complicate real-time footstep planning in unstructured environments. To overcome this problem, this work proposes a vision-based hierarchical control framework that […]

MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Real-Time Perception and Mixed-Integer Footstep Control for Underactuated Bipedal Walking on Rough Terrain”

Towne 319 220 S. 33rd Street, Philadelphia, United States

The promise of bipedal robots is to go where people go, serving as surrogates for human labor in dangerous, unstructured environments. For the most part, this promise remains unrealized. The primary challenge for controlling bipedal locomotion is underactuation. Standing on a single leg limits control authority, requiring appropriate foot placement to generate or absorb momentum […]

MEAM Seminar: “SLAM in Hard Places”

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

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping is a fundamental problem for robots interacting with a novel environment and has been a densely studied area of research for several decades. The modern paradigm of feature extraction and matching coupled with advancements in sensor technology have allowed robots to achieve sub meter localization accuracy over kilometer long trajectories in […]

MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Elastomeric Strain Limitation for Design of Soft Pneumatic Actuators”

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

Modern robots embody power and precision control, yet as robots undertake tasks that apply forces on humans this power brings risk of injury. Soft robotic actuators use deformation to produce smooth, continuous motions and conform to delicate objects while imparting forces capable of safely pushing humans. This thesis presents strategies for the design, modeling, and […]

MEAM Seminar: “Modularity Strategies for Pneumatic Control in Soft Robotic Systems”

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

Soft robotic systems, defined as both compliant robotic platforms and mechanically adaptive structures, offer unique advantages such as safe human-machine interaction, structural flexibility, and environment-driven reconfigurability. By relying on deformable materials and embedded physical intelligence, these systems can achieve complex motions and responsive behaviors that are difficult for conventional rigid robots. Pneumatic control, including actuation, […]

MEAM Ph.D. Thesis: “Geometric Methods for Efficient and Explainable Control of Underactuated Robotic Systems”

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

Robots are complex, high-dimensional systems, governed by nonlinear, underactuated dynamics and evolving on non-Euclidean manifolds, posing numerous challenges for control synthesis and analysis. While optimization-based methods of control can flexibly accommodate diverse dynamics, costs, and constraints, they often demand coarse approximations or powerful onboard processors (infeasible for many aerial and space systems) due to their […]