Speaker: Justin Yim, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Science and Engineering at University of Illinois

Title: Small Robots Traversing the World at Large

Date and Time: Friday, October 27 at 1:30 PM CT

Location: ME B211 and Zoom

Zoom Link: https://tinyurl.com/CRBSeminar

? NU-authenticated attendees will be automatically admitted. Others, please email amy.nedoss@northwestern.edu to be admitted from the waiting room.

Abstract:

Legged robots show great promise in navigating difficult environments. Even small legged robots can use their agility to overcome significant obstacles like their larger counterparts. However, much work remains to be done both in mechanical design and control to enable robots to apply these abilities outside the lab in the real world. This talk presents an overview of three relatively small robots that address different aspects of legged mobility (organized in increasing numbers of legs). The monoped Salto-1P explores agile leaping to enable a small robot to clear large obstacles, simple bipeds investigate how walking scales to smaller sizes, and perception and control for quadruped Spirit-40 tackle walking through entangling obstacles like vines.

Bio:

Justin Yim is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the Mechanical Science and Engineering department (UIUC MechSE). He completed his BSE and MSE at the University of Pennsylvania, his PhD at UC Berkeley in Prof. Ron Fearing's Biomimetic Millisystems Lab, then a Computing Research Association CIFellow 2020 postdoc with Prof. Aaron Johnson at the Robomechanics Lab at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Yim's research interests are in the design and control of legged robots to improve performance and understand locomotion principles. For his dissertation work developing the jumping monopod robot Salto-1P, he received best paper and best student paper awards at the IEEE/RSJ IROS and IEEE ICRA conferences.