Title：Computational Modeling of Physical Origami Robots
Time：14:30 to 15:30, Dec.9, 2019
Place：F207, School of Mechanical Engineering
Host：CHEN Feifei, Associate Professor (Institute of Robotics )
Speaker：Dr. Hongying Zhang (EPFL)

Biography
Dr. Zhang Hongying is postdoc of the Reconfigurable Robotics Lab at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). She received her Bachelor’s Degree from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 2013 and Ph.D. from National University of Singapore in 2018. Her research interests include soft robots, origami robots and 3D printing, with a focus on designing soft dielectric elastomer sensors, developing 3D printable soft grippers through topology optimization approach, and modeling and designing reconfigurable robots with origami structures. Dr. Zhang has published more than 16 papers in the top tier journals and leading conferences in robotics and control in recent years.

Abstract
Origami robots are scalable, customizable and safe, enabling them to be used in various scenarios ranging from microscale to mesoscale, such as miniaturized medical robots, rehabilitation exoskeletons, architectural metamaterials, and manipulators and more. Currently, there is a rising trend of adopting thick origami with smooth folds in order to achieve high payload, self-folding, or self-sensing behaviors. Computational modeling of origami robots allows for synthesizing their kinematics and kinetics and developing new device applications. In this talk, I will cover how to model the kinetics of various origami robots that undergo large displacements, including localized bending of the nonzero-width smooth folds and global displacement of rigid facets, and contact between adjacent facets. I will also highlight and forecast how origami principle can uniquely contribute to the study of medical robots through its intrinsic shape-shifting concept from two-dimensional to three-dimensional space.