multiplatform interactive robotics laboratory

Three research pillars drive our work: transducer design, sensing and actuation systems, and robotic and wearable platforms. All three rest on a common foundation: sensing and actuation technologies co-designed with mechanics, compliant materials, and efficient computing, then integrated at the system level. We build on that foundation to create intelligent and robotic systems that work seamlessly in the real world — unmanned vehicles that navigate and coordinate autonomously, biomedical wearables that diagnose and monitor disease, and haptic interfaces that deliver rich tactile feedback. A soft transducer’s capability comes as much from its geometry, material, and mechanism as from the transduction principle itself. That leaves an unusually wide design space with no single obvious path through it. We search that space by borrowing mechanisms from biology, from microsystems, and from integrated circuits, grounding every choice in the two things that decide what can actually be built: the physics governing the device, and the fabrication process available to make it. Mechanisms for soft transducers. On the sensing side, devices that report several stimuli at once or stay quiet until a threshold is crossed, rebuilding the encoding strategies that mechanoreceptors use in living organisms. On the actuation side, the same question in reverse: what structure turns a simple, uniform input into a shaped and programmable motion. Physics-informed machine learning for design-space search. Multiphysics models of the coupled electromechanical behavior inside a soft device set the boundaries of what its response can be. Trained into fast surrogate models, they let us search the design space itself, optimizing geometry, material, and mechanism at once rather than one variant at a time