Seminar with Speaker Dr. Cynthia Sung

 Abstract

Soft robots introduce new opportunities for design and control approaches that take advantage of a robot's internal mechanics to perform a task. Robot design is an inherently difficult process that requires balancing many different aspects: geometry kinematics, compliance, actuation, power, and more. When actuation and computation embedded in the body give us the ability to change any of these properties on the fly, these variables are also potential avenues for planning and control. 

In this talk, I will discuss recent work from my group in which we explore soft and compliant systems with tunable stiffness distributions. These systems present interesting new architectures that combine local and global actuation to, for example, change the state of a soft manipulator arm. I will discuss reduced models that allow us to plan over this combined system. I will also show how these models extend to traditional rigid robots operating in soft environments, such as sandy ground, to produce more robust navigation.

 Biography

Cynthia Sung is an Associate 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 robot co-design, with a particular focus on origami-inspired and compliant robots. She is the recipient of a 2024 ARO Early Career Award, 2023 ONR Young Investigator award, and a 2019 NSF CAREER award.