Integrated multi-material robots

My current overarching research thrust is to develop robot systems that can leverage complex material and sensing architectures to improve task performance. The end goal is to create robots that, like humans, are not afraid of bumping into the world in unexpected ways. Ongoing work centers around the design and development of manufacturing approaches to tightly integrate sensing with traditional engineering materials and materials to more closely mimic soft tissue. Most robots shown on this website exhibit this paradigm in some fashion.

Publications

• Z. J. Patterson, E. Sologuren, C. Della Santina, and D. Rus, “Design and Control of Modular Soft-Rigid Hybrid Manipulators with Self-Contact,” arXiv: arXiv:2408.09275. Link
• Z. J. Patterson, C. D. Santina, and D. Rus, “Modeling and Control of Intrinsically Elasticity Coupled Soft-Rigid Robots,” ICRA, May 2024. Link