Simulation, Sensing and Control of Soft Robots
Event details
Researchers have devoted to developing a variety of soft robotic systems in the laboratory to take advantage of compliance introduced by soft materials. While being able to mimic natural systems and building compatible robots working together with humans, the challenge of lacking computational tools in design also dampens the development of soft robotics in industrial applications. Specifically, the design and control practices taken in soft robotics at present are mainly based on intuition and trial-and-error empirical tests. In this talk, I am going to introduce our recent work to overcome these challenges by simulating, sensing and controlling the motion of soft robots. The effectiveness of our approach has been verified on pneumatic-driven soft robots for path following, interactive positioning and target-based deformation control.
Prof. Charlie C. L. Wang
Prof. Charlie C. L. Wang is currently Chair of Smart Manufacturing at the University of Manchester (UoM). Before joining UoM in 2020, he worked as a Professor and Chair of Advanced Manufacturing at Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands (2016) and as a Professor (2015) / Associate Professor (2009) / Assistant Professor (2003) of Mechanical and Automation Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He also held a visiting professor position at University of Southern California during his sabbatical leave (2011). He received his B.Eng. degree (1998) in mechatronics engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology and his Ph.D. degree (2002) in mechanical engineering from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). Prof. Wang was the recipient of several awards, including the ASME CIE Excellence in Research Award (2016), the ASME CIE Young Engineer Award (2009), eight Best Paper Awards, five project-oriented technology innovation awards and three teaching awards. He was elected to be a Fellow of American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) in 2013, and is currently chairing the executive committee of Solid Modeling Association (SMA). His research interests include Digital Manufacturing, Computational Design, Additive Manufacturing, Soft Robotics, Mass Personalization, and Geometric Computing.