LCSR Seminar: Margaret Coad

Description

Margaret Coad, an assistant professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at the University of Notre Dame, will give a talk titled "Soft and Continuum Robots for Unstructured Environments" for the Laboratory for Computational Sensing + Robotics.

Abstract:

Soft and continuum robots have immense potential to assist humans with tasks that require navigation and manipulation in unstructured environments. In this talk, I present my group's research on the design, modeling, and control of a variety of soft and continuum robots. I begin by discussing soft vine-inspired robots, which move through their environment by extending from their tip and are well suited for navigation and manipulation within confined spaces. In particular, I discuss our research on vine robot field deployment, shape sensing, force sensing, and collapse modeling. I then present our research on two other bioinspired robots: spider monkey tail-inspired robots for grasping objects, and amoeba-inspired robots for navigation in confined spaces. Finally, I discuss our research on soft wearable robots for replacing or assisting the motion of the upper limbs. This research helps make robots more capable of assisting humans in the unstructured environments of everyday life.

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