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MEAM Seminar: “Computational Design of Origami and Compliant Robots”

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

Soft and compliant robots provide new opportunities for machines that are flexible, adaptable, safe, and robust. Origami-inspired engineering enables custom robots to be designed and fabricated within days, or even hours. These robots are capable of executing a variety of shape-changing and dynamical tasks by taking advantage of their folded shape and programmable mechanics. In […]

ESE Grace Hopper Lecture – “Disrupting NextG”

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

As 5G takes to the airwaves, we now turn our imagination to the next generation of wireless technology. The promise of this technology has created an international race to innovate, with significant investment by government as well as industry. And much innovation is needed as 6G aspires to not only support significantly higher data rates […]

MEAM Seminar: “Making Dynamic Robots Taskable”

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

In this talk, I will share some insights and observations from our work on Atlas, the world's most dynamic humanoid robot. I'll talk about some of the core ideas—like model-predictive control (MPC)—that have made an impact for us, how learning is playing a larger role in how we design control systems at Boston Dynamics, and […]

MEAM Seminar: “Dexterous Decision-Making for Real-World Robotic Manipulation”

Towne 337

For a robot to prepare a meal or clean a room, it must make a large array of decisions, such as what objects to clean first, where to grasp each ingredient and tool, how to open a heavy, overstuffed cabinet, and so on. To enable robots to tackle these tasks, I decompose the problem into […]

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 […]