November Luncheon Meeting (Goleta) 11/14/18

Adding Soft to Robotics: From gecko-inspired wall-climbing to vine-inspired navigation

Natural systems--such as climbing geckos and wandering vines--are incredibly robust, adaptable, and capable of handling uncertainty in their environments. These traits are unfortunately not true about current engineered robotic systems. Dr. Hawkes will discuss efforts to learn from nature by incorporating compliance, or softness, into robots to create new functionality. He will show results from recent work, including geck0-inspired adhesives that allow a human to climb a glass wall and vine-inspired robots that "grow" through challenging environments, such as a forest of nails or, potentially, the tortuous pathways inside the human body.

Dr. Elliott W. Hawkes is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at UCSB. Previously, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship with Prof. Allison Okamura at Standford University, received his Ph.D. with Prof. Mark Cutkosky, also at Standford, and worked in the Harvard Microrobotics Lab and the ETH Multi-scale Robotics Lab. He has received a variety of awards and fellowships, and his work has received press from outlets such as the NY Times, BBC, Cell Science, and the Late Show with Stephen Colbert.