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MEAM Seminar: “Computational Design of Origami and Compliant Robots”
December 5, 2023 at 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM
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 this talk, I will show how the kinematics and compliance of a thin-shell mechanism can be designed algorithmically. I will also discuss how we can leverage these designs for better performance and simpler control, and how these approaches provide robots with capabilities such as dynamical hopping, swimming, and flight.
![](https://events.seas.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/sung-cynthia.jpg)
Cynthia Sung
Gabel Family Term Assistant Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering & Applied Mechanics, University of Pennsylvania
Cynthia Sung is the Gabel Family Term Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics (MEAM) and a member of the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing & Perception (GRASP) lab at the University of Pennsylvania. She received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2016 and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Rice University in 2011. Her research interests are computational methods for design automation of robotic systems, with a particular focus on origami-inspired and compliant robots. She is the recipient of a 2023 ONR Young Investigator award, a 2020 Johnson & Johnson Women in STEM2D Scholars Award, and a 2019 NSF CAREER award.