Welcome Prof. Kyu-Jin Cho from Seoul National University in Korea to visit our lab and give a report on Soft Bio-inspired Robotics on September 18, 2015.

Prof. Kyu-Jin Cho (M`08) received B.S and M.S. degrees from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea in 1998 and 2000, respectively, and a Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2007. He was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory until 2008. At present, he is an associate professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and the director of Biorobotics Laboratory at Seoul National University. His research interests include biologically inspired robotics, soft robotics, soft wearable devices, novel mechanisms using smart structures, and rehabilitation and assistive robotics. He has received the 2014 IEEE RAS Early Academic Career Award, 2014 ASME Compliant Mechanism Award, 2013 IROS Best Video Award and 2013 KSPE Paik Am Award.

Soft robotics is an emerging field of research that uses soft or compliant materials and elements to overcome the limitation of traditional robotics. Traditionally, robots have been used in an industrial environment with few unknown parameters. As more and more robots are used to interact with environments that are uncertain and vulnerable to change, a technology that can easily adapt to the changing environment is needed. Soft robotics deals with this issue by using soft and compliant elements in an intelligent way. Bio-inspired robotics is the field of robotics that leads the use of this technology. Nature has many examples where it achieves high performance with a soft intelligent design. Waterstrider, for example, can jump on water as high as jumping on ground by intelligently controlling the force profile that is applies on the water, and inchworm achieves adaptive gripping with its prolegs by using the buckling effect. These examples show that high performance can be achieved with a simple and minimum design. Origami inspired design can be used to supplement and overcome some of the issues of soft robots. Also, wearable robots can be made more comfortable to wear, lightweight and small size by using soft robotics technology. In this talk, I will give an overview of various soft bio-inspired robotic technologies and some of the robots that are being developed at SNU Biorobotics Laboratory. These soft robotic technologies will be helpful for robots that need to perform in rough or uncertain environments with a limited size, such as military robots and biomedical robots.