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MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Do the Twist: Toward Agile Control of an Axially Twisting Robotic Quadruped”

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

Even as they continue to improve, legged robots pale in comparison to their biological counterparts. This discrepancy is at least partly due to robots possessing an order of magnitude fewer degrees of freedom. In fact, most dynamically capable quadrupedal robots lack any degrees of freedom in the torso, opting instead for a simpler, single, rigid […]

MEAM Master’s Thesis Defense: “Optical Analysis of Buckling-Induced Micro-Robotic Membranes”

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

In recent years, micro-robotic membranes have attracted increasing interest due to their unique properties and potential applications in various fields. The optical properties of these membranes have been playing a crucial role in the design and development of optical devices such as reflective displays with customizable colors. The primary challenge to understanding the mechanical-spectral interaction […]

MEAM Master’s Thesis Defense: “Gaussian Process-Based Active Exploration Strategies in Vision and Touch”

Meyerson Hall, Room B2 210 S. 34th Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Robots struggle to understand object properties like shape, material, and semantics due to limited prior knowledge, hindering manipulation in unstructured environments. In contrast, humans learn these properties through interactive multi-sensor exploration. This work proposes fusing visual and tactile observations into a unified Gaussian Process Distance Field (GPDF) representation for active perception of object properties. While […]

IDEAS Seminar: “An optimization framework for designing robust state estimators”

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

Cyber-physical systems often include communication networks that ensure data transmission between different components of the system (sensors, actuators, processing units, etc). The presence of such networks renders the whole system vulnerable to malicious attacks consisting, for example, in the injection of arbitrary signals. In this context, the data collected over the communication channel may be […]

MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Bistable Structures Enable Passive Transitions in Mobile Robots”

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

Making robots more capable, agile, and efficient requires careful design of the robot’s mechanical body to match task requirements. Passive components allow a robot to perform a task without a dedicated actuator, often improving both power consumption and overall performance. In this thesis, we investigate robotic applications of bistable mechanisms, mechanical structures that exhibit two […]

MEAM Seminar: “Controlling Contact Transitions for Dynamic Robots”

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

Legged robots, robotic manipulators, and their combined embodiment as humanoid robots have received considerable attention across both academia and industry. However, with few notable exceptions, state-of-the-art demonstrations are significantly less dynamic than their biological counterparts. A considerable challenge for performing more dynamic tasks for both legged robots and robotics manipulators lies within controlling contact interactions […]

MEAM Seminar: “Rapidly Understanding Novel Object Dynamics for Robotic Manipulation”

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

The field of robotic manipulation is attempting to expand from structured warehouse and lab environments to in-the-wild applications in human-centric settings. When deployed in novel settings, a robot may see and need to interact with a new object for the first time. Model-based control approaches rely on a priori dynamics models, an assumption that does […]

MEAM Seminar: “Macroscopic Ensemble Methods for Robot Team Data Collection in Dynamic Environments”

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

Data is necessary to improve our understanding of dynamic environments, like the ocean. With limited sensing resources, the challenge lies in identifying and acquiring sensor measurements over large spatial and temporal scales. One solution is to use a team of robots equipped with sensors to collect data. However, robot teams still require methods that effectively […]

MEAM Seminar: “Metallivore Robots Powered by Aluminum-air Batteries”

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

Mobile robots have shown significant advancements in agility, intelligence, and efficiency over the past few decades. However, their endurance and overall performance remain limited by the onboard power supplies. Current power sources typically restrict mobile robots to areas close to the electrical grid and necessitate heavier batteries for extended range. Energy refueling could be significantly […]

MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Multi-Robot Coordination and Cooperation via Graph-Based Computation”

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

Multi-robot coordination and cooperation are critical behaviors that improve team performance and enable new tasks in application areas like autonomous construction, agriculture, and extended operation in large unknown regions. This dissertation examines these behaviors in the context of the multi-robot resource allocation problem, where robots must be allocated to regions of demand. In particular, we […]