LCSR Seminar: Kevin Chen

Description

Yufeng (Kevin) Chen, an associate professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, will give a talk titled "Insect-scale Micro-Aerial-Robots Powered by Soft Artificial Muscles" for the Laboratory for Computational Sensing + Robotics.

Abstract:

Recent advances in microrobotics have demonstrated remarkable locomotive capabilities such as hovering flights, impulsive jumps, and fast running in insect-scale robots. However, most microrobots that are powered by power-dense rigid actuators have not achieved insect-like collision resilience. In this talk, I will present our recent effort in developing a new class of microrobots—ones that are powered by high bandwidth soft actuators and equipped with rigid appendages for effective interactions with environments. Toward improving collision robustness of micro-aerial robots, we develop the first heavier-than-air aerial robot powered by soft artificial muscles that demonstrates a 1000-second hovering flight. In addition, our robot can recover from an in-flight collision and perform a somersault within 0.10 seconds. The robot's maximum lift is comparable to that of the best rigid-powered sub-gram robots. This work demonstrates for the first time that soft aerial robots can achieve agile and robust flight capabilities absent in rigid-powered micro-aerial vehicles, thus showing the potential of a new class of hybrid soft-rigid robots.