Manipulating the Inanimate:

Sensor-Enabled Control of Soft Objects Using Robotic Skins

Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio

Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Yale University

TUE. October 09, 2018 @ 4:30pm

Building 550, the Atrium

Abstract: Robots generally excel at specific tasks in structured environments, but lack the versatility and adaptability required to interact-with and locomote-within the natural world. To increase versatility in robot design, my research group is developing robotic skins that can wrap around arbitrary deformable objects to induce the desired motions and deformations. Robotic skins integrate actuation and sensing into a single conformable material, and may be applied-to, removed-from, and transferred-between different objects to create a multitude of controllable robots with different functions to accommodate the demands of different environments. We have shown that attaching the same robotic skin to a deformable object in different ways, or to different objects, leads to unique motions. Further, we have shown that combining multiple robotic skins enables complex motions and functions. During this talk, I will demonstrate the versatility of this soft robot design approach by showing robotic skins in a wide range of applications – including manipulation tasks, locomotion, and wearables – using the same 2D robotic skins reconfigured on the surface of various 3D soft, inanimate objects.

Bio: Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Yale University. She completed her B.S. at the Johns Hopkins University, M.S. at U.C. Berkeley, and Ph.D. at Harvard University. Prior to joining the faculty at Yale, she was an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University for four years. She currently serves as an Associate Editor of Frontiers in Robotics and AI: Soft Robotics, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, and IOPscience Multifunctional Materials. She is the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the NASA Early Career Faculty Award, the AFOSR Young Investigator Award, the ONR Young Investigator Award, and was named to Forbes’ 2015 30 under 30 list.