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Oct27
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Speaker: Justin Yim, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Science and Engineering at University of Illinois
Title: Small Robots Traversing the World at LargeDate 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.TIME Friday, October 27, 2023 at 1:30 PM - 2:30 PM
LOCATION ME B211, Technological Institute map it
CONTACT Amy Nedoss amy.nedoss@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR Center for Robotics and Biosystems (CRB)
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Jan12
EVENT DETAILS
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For three centuries, Western thought lived under Newton’s clockwork paradigm—a
worldview of predictability, control, and linear causation. It shaped institutions from
Madison’s checks and balances to Taylor’s scientific management, defining modernity.
But successive scientific revolutions—statistical thermodynamics, relativity, quantum
mechanics, evolution, game theory, DNA, and AI—revealed a radically different
universe: dynamic, probabilistic, and deeply complex. We have shifted from Newton’s
clocks to what Popper called a “cloud world,” marked by emergence, interdependence,
and irreducible uncertainty.This talk traces how these revolutions reshaped our understanding of reality and
explores their leadership implications: why navigating 21st-century challenges demands
embracing complexity, cultivating resilience, and designing organizations that work with,
rather than against, dynamic systems.Bio:
Julio Mario Ottino is a researcher, engineering scientist, academic leader, educator, artist, and author. He is Founder and Co-Director of the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems, McCormick Institute Professor of Engineering, W.P. Murphy Professor of Chemical Engineering, with a courtesy appointment in Mechanical Engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering, and Professor of Management and Organizations at Northwestern at the Kellogg School of Management in Northwestern University. Widely recognized as a world authority on mixing, chaos, and complexity, he has been a Guggenheim Fellow and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. As Dean of Engineering, he launched major university-wide initiatives, programs, degrees, and centers spanning design, energy and sustainability, synthetic biology, human–computer interaction, and entrepreneurship. His most recent book, The Nexus (MIT Press, 2022) was a category winner in Engineering and Technology, from the Association of American Publishers
TIME Monday, January 12, 2026 at 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
LOCATION LR3, Technological Institute map it
CONTACT Jeremy Wells jeremywells@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick - Mechanical Engineering (ME)
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Feb2
EVENT DETAILS
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We provide an overview of a recent NASA University Leadership Initiative project entitled “Development of an Ecosystem for Qualification of Additive Manufacturing Processes and Materials in Aviation”. This work demonstrated the dependence of fatigue on defect structures in AM Ti-6Al-4V. Our current NASA Science & Technology Research Institute “Institute for Model-Based Qualification & Certification of Additive Manufacturing (IMQCAM)” is creating a numerical digital twin (DT) for predicting fatigue as a function of process parameters. The key result of a systematic variation across power-velocity space was that the defect number density was anti-correlated with fatigue life. The fatigue-based process window was much narrower compared to typical reports and explainable in terms of observed variations based on spatter rates and intermittent lack of melt pool overlap. We report on recent developments in modeling microstructure, texture and pores along with variations in heat treatment. We conclude that establishing a qualified materials process is feasible via an efficient survey of a limited domain of process space. Linking models together in the DT requires substantial effort in terms of data exchange. In terms of predictability of fatigue, the limited data suggests that the scatter in life is smallest in the long crack (Paris Law) regime, intermediate for short cracks and largest for crack nucleation. This provides an important background for Uncertainty Quantification (UQ), which is a major focus for the IMQCAM team and which has already revealed a significant sensitivity to compositional variations, for example.
Support from multiple agencies is gratefully acknowledged, including NASA, DOE/BES, DOE/NNSA, ONR, NSF, OEA, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and Ametek. I am indebted to my many collaborators.
Bio:
I have been a member of the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University since 1995. I am also the Co-Director of the NextManufacturing Center on additive manufacturing. Previously, I worked for the University of California at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. I spent nine years in management with four years as a Group Leader (and then Deputy Division Director) at Los Alamos, followed by five years as Department Head at CMU (up to 2000). I have been a Fellow of ASM since 1996, Fellow of the Institute of Physics (UK) since 2004 and Fellow of TMS since 2011. I received the Cyril Stanley Smith Award from TMS in 2014, was elected as Member of Honor by the French Metallurgical Society in 2015 and then became the US Steel Professor of Metallurgical Engineering and Materials Science in 2017. I received Cyril Stanley Smith Award from the International Conference on Recrystallization and Grain Growth in 2019 and the Hans Bunge Award from the Intl. Conf. on Textures of Materials (ICOTOM) in 2024. I was an International Francqui Professor (Belgium) in 2022 and I received the ASM Gold Medal and was promoted to University Professor, both in 2024. My research focuses on processing-microstructure-properties relationships with interests in additive manufacturing, the measurement and prediction of microstructural evolution, the relationship between microstructure and properties, especially three-dimensional effects, texture & anisotropy and the use of synchrotron x-rays.
TIME Monday, February 2, 2026 at 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
LOCATION LR3, Technological Institute map it
CONTACT Jeremy Wells jeremywells@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick - Mechanical Engineering (ME)