Abstract: During cardiovascular development, peristaltic contraction of the embryonic heart tube produces time-varying hemodynamic forces and pressure gradients across the atrioventricular canal. However, the relative importance of myocardial contraction and hemodynamic force to modulate cardiovascular morphogenesis in the non-Newtonian flow regime remains poorly understood. By developing the 4-D light-sheet fluorescent microscope and post-imaging machine-learning algorithms, […]

From autonomous vehicles navigating busy intersections to quadrupeds deployed in household environments, robots must operate safely and efficiently around people in uncertain and unstructured situations. However, today's robots still struggle to robustly handle low-probability events without becoming overly conservative. In this talk, I will discuss how planning in the joint space of physical and information […]

Preventing injury and restoring mobility following injury, both musculoskeletal and neuromuscular, is challenging. In recent years, the fields of biomechanics and clinical rehabilitation have informed the development of wearable devices and assessment tools that aid in rehabilitation and in maintaining mobility. Wearable exosystems are assistive devices that can target weakness in a specific joint or […]

Robots are traditionally designed with fixed physical hardware and control policies that make them specialized for repetitive tasks and structured environments. This talk discusses foundational work toward robots that "evolve on demand," morphing their bodies and adapting their behaviors to accommodate multiple tasks in diverse environments. First, I will introduce robotic structures made from stiffness-changing […]

Efficient and resilient coordination among autonomous agents plays an important role in various domains such as energy management, robotic swarms, autonomous vehicles and beyond. As these systems grow in complexity and scale, the challenge of achieving optimal coordination becomes increasingly difficult. The first part of the talk will focus on tackling scalability issues by leveraging […]