Recent years have seen a large interest in soft robotic systems, which provide new opportunities for machines that are flexible, adaptable, safe, and robust. In this talk, I will share efforts from my group to use origami-inspired design approaches to create compliant robots capable of executing a variety of shape-changing and dynamical tasks. I will show how the kinematics and compliance of a mechanism can be designed to produce a particular mechanical response, how we can leverage these designs for better performance and simpler control, and how we approach these problems computationally to design new robots with capabilities such as hopping, swimming, and flight.

Bio:

Cynthia Sung is the Gabel Family Term Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics (MEAM) and a member of the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing & Perception (GRASP) lab at the University of Pennsylvania. She received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2016 and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Rice University in 2011. Her research interests are computational methods for design automation of robotic systems, with a particular focus on origami-inspired and compliant robots. She is the recipient of a 2023 ONR Young Investigator award, a 2020 Johnson & Johnson Women in STEM2D Scholars Award, and a 2019 NSF CAREER award.

Website: sung.seas.upenn.edu