Penn Engineering Events

GRASP

  1. Events
  2. GRASP

Events Search and Views Navigation

Event Views Navigation

Today

MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Adding Actuation to Found Material: A Design Methodology”

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

Engineers in modern society are taught to design and build structures and robots from pre-processed materials, giving them the ability to describe the operating capacity of their structure with a high degree of certainty. From a disaster recovery and robust systems point of view, this is a severe limitation. Rather than use processed material of […]

MEAM Seminar: “Semantic Localization, Mapping, and Exploration by Multiple Aerial Robots”

Moore 212

Traditional approaches for active mapping focus on building geometric maps. For most real-world applications, however, actionable information is related to semantically meaningful objects in the environment. We propose an approach to the active metric-semantic mapping problem that enables multiple heterogeneous robots to collaboratively build a map of the environment. The robots actively explore to minimize […]

MEAM Seminar: “Bistable Robots: Leveraging Task Features for Actuator Reduction”

Moore 212

Actuator reduction is especially important for aerial robots, where minimizing mass and conserving power is critical. Bistable mechanisms have been used to augment actuators by speeding up actuation time or allowing one direction of actuation to be passive. In this talk we will explore how bistable mechanisms can reduce the number of actuators needed in […]

MEAM Seminar: “Hierarchical Methods for Geometric Control of Underactuated, Free-Flying Robotic Systems”

Towne 337

Free-flying robotic systems (such as multibody aerial and space vehicles) evolve on high-dimensional non-Euclidean manifolds subject to nonlinear, underactuated dynamics. Because such systems can rely only on the severely limited computational resources available onboard, the design of general-purpose controllers capable of dynamic and reliable real-time performance remains a formidable challenge. To mitigate these obstacles and […]

MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Exploiting Flows for Orienteering and Planning Problems”

Towne 337

Task and path planning algorithms for robots in the presence of flows confront a fundamental dichotomy between the continuous and the discrete: task planning algorithms discretize the world and their goals, whereas flows are continuous in nature. This contrast is exemplified in many robotic applications where environmental forces impact navigation and exploiting those flows is […]

Nano Seminar: “Conductive Nitrides for Plasmonics in the Visible Region: Properties and Applications”

Room 35, Singh Center for Nanotechnology 3205 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Plasmonic nanostructure based on silver and gold that produces LSPR to withstand ultrahigh temperatures without damage remains a great challenge for future ultra-compact integrated circuits, and high-power enabled photonic devices. In principle, the shapes of plasmonic nanostructures containing noble metals would change after the heat treatment that altered the plasmonic resonance. Thus, discovering refractory plasmonic […]

MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Mobile Wireless Infrastructure on Demand in Robot Teams”

216 Moore Building

Communication is fundamental to successful coordination in teams of robots. Indeed, the promise that robot teams can complete tasks faster and more efficiently than any single agent depends on their ability to share information and effectively coordinate their actions. Today, teams of mobile robots are increasingly being deployed to tackle challenging tasks in environments without […]

MEAM Seminar: “Bringing Microrobots into Biomedicine”

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

Recent progress in diverse disciplines such as soft matter physics, nanoparticle synthesis, nanomedicine, and microbiology has enabled rich opportunities for translation of small-scale robots into medical applications. These robotic systems are providing innovative, high-precision, therapeutic and diagnostic approaches for the treatment of diseases associated with microbial biofilms and are rapidly moving from proof-of-concept studies to […]

MEAM Seminar: “A Symbiotic Philosophy for Bio-inspired Robotics”

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

Humans have frequently looked to natural phenomena to inspire the design of art, structures, and mechanisms. However, there are as many different ways to learn from nature as there are words for this approach: bioinspiration, biomimicry, and biodesign to name a few. In this talk, I propose a taxonomy for categorizing distinct biodesign approaches and […]

MEAM Seminar: “Hardware / Controls Co-design to Overcome Challenges for Aerial Robots”

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

Aerial robotics have become ubiquitous, but (like most robots) they still struggle to operate at high speed in unstructured, cramped environments. By considering a vehicle's mechanical design simultaneously with the design of controls and automation algorithms, we have more degrees of freedoms to find creative solutions to problems. In this talk I will present some […]