Compliant, Dynamical Robots

Recent years have seen a large interest in soft robotic systems, which provide new opportunities for machines that are flexible, adaptable, safe, and robust. These systems have been highly successful in a broad range of applications, including manipulation, locomotion, human-robot interaction, and more, but they present challenging design and control problems.

On June 9, 2022 (ET), Penn Engineering Prof. Cynthia Sung shared efforts from her group to expand the capabilities of compliant and origami robots to dynamical tasks. She showed how the compliance of a mechanism can be designed to produce a particular mechanical response, how her group can leverage these designs for better performance and simpler control, and how they approach these problems computationally to design new compliant robots with new capabilities such as hopping, swimming, and flight.

This event was part of the 2022 Penn Engineering Emerging Research Virtual Series, in which Penn Engineering faculty present their emerging research.

​​Watch the full event recording above.