*This seminar will be held in-person in Levine 307 as well as virtually via Zoom. This seminar will NOT be recorded.

ABSTRACT

This talk has two parts. First, I will explain our recent work on making it easier to control 3D soft robots. By extending our prior work on soft robot inverse kinematics (Soft IK) into virtual reality (VR), we realize an intuitive, real-time posing pipeline for arbitrary 3D soft robots. This pipeline promises to extend to mixed reality applications. Second, I will introduce a new experimental CAD program called Conversation. Conversation enables novice users to quickly design simple 3D-printed machines. The software features a unique workflow (2D sketch and 3D part remain separate), utilizes an unconventional mesh-based geometry kernel (Manifold), and is very fast (go from DXF to STL in seconds – minutes) and very small (executable weighs ~1 MB). It is also a promising target for new computational design algorithms.