Events
Past Event
ME512 Distinguished Seminar Speaker: Dr. Mary Frecker
McCormick - Mechanical Engineering (ME)
3:00 PM
//
ITW, Ford Motor Company Engineering Design Center
Details
Making compliant mechanisms smart: nonlinear modeling and design optimization
Dr. Mary Frecker
Distinguished Speaker
Professor of Mechanical & Biomedical Engineering
Penn State University
Abstract - Compliant mechanisms have been the subject of intense research in recent decades. Making compliant mechanisms “smart” to form flexible, adaptive structures is the focus of my research group, with applications ranging from medical devices to aerospace structures. This seminar will describe recent work on modeling approaches for compliant mechanisms with both superelastic material behavior and large deformations, which have not been considered previously in the literature. This approach allows for design of compliant mechanism-based metamaterials with highly nonlinear stiffness and enhanced energy absorption. Additionally, the presentation will cover our method for designing active compliant mechanisms that change shape on demand due to application of external stimulus such as magnetic field, electric field, or temperature. Methods to optimize origami-based designs with magneto active elastomer and dielectric elastomer materials will be described, along with an analytical modeling approach for soft magneto active elastomer devices produced via additive manufacturing.
Bio - Mary Frecker is the Head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering, the Leighton Riess Chair in Engineering, and the founding director of the Center for Biodevices at Pennsylvania State University. She has served as Associate Department Head for Graduate Programs in Mechanical & Nuclear Engineering, as well as Director of the Bernard Gordon Learning Factory in the College of Engineering. Dr. Frecker has a B.S. from the University of Dayton, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan. Dr. Frecker has been awarded the Pearce Endowed Development Professorship in Mechanical Engineering at Penn State, the GM/Freudenstein Young Investigator Award by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Mechanisms Committee (2002), the Outstanding Advising Award by the Penn State Engineering Society (2002), the Outstanding Research Award by the Penn State Engineering Society (2005), three ASME Best Paper awards (2009 and 2015), and the ASME Adaptive Structures and Material Systems Award (2021). She served as an Executive Leadership in Academic Technology & Engineering (ELATE) Fellow in 2018-2019, and completed the Changing the Future for Senior Women Faculty in STEM leadership program in 2019. Dr. Frecker is a Fellow of the ASME, is currently an Executive Committee member of the ASME Design Engineering Division and past Chair of the ASME Mechanisms & Robotics Technical Committee, and has served as Associate Editor of the ASME Journal of Mechanical Design, Chair of the ASME Adaptive Structures and Material Systems Technical Committee, and Executive Committee member of the ASME Aerospace Division.
Time
Monday, February 6, 2023 at 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Location
ITW, Ford Motor Company Engineering Design Center Map
Contact
Calendar
McCormick - Mechanical Engineering (ME)
ME512 Distinguished Speaker Seminar Marcia K. O'Malley
McCormick - Mechanical Engineering (ME)
3:00 PM
//
LR3, Technological Institute
Details
Guiding with Touch: Haptic Feedback for Enhancing Human Motor Performance
Recent advances in virtual reality simulation and robotics have changed the way that motor skills are trained, yet the feedback that most trainees receive when working in these environments is still delayed, subjective, and qualitative, which does not provide the maximum support for rapid acquisition of motor skill. In this talk, I will describe our research on identifying objective and quantitative metrics that capture motor skills in a few different tasks, and I will present our methods for employing real-time haptic feedback and guidance. We have shown that different implementations of haptic guidance provided via kinesthetic feedback can have either negative, neutral, or positive effects on motor performance and skill acquisition. More recently, we have shifted to provide cutaneous haptic feedback for guidance or performance feedback. We have shown that low-level properties of movements (e.g., smoothness) made in the performance of several motor tasks—including surgery in both virtual and robotic environments—are highly correlated with high-level performance outcomes. We encode these movement properties as simple haptic cues that are conveyed to the trainee in real-time, and evaluate the effect on skill acquisition. This talk will highlight our progress over the past decade in implementing real-time haptic feedback via wearable devices to train complex motor skills.
Marcia O’Malley’s research addresses issues that arise when humans physically interact with robotic systems, with a focus on wearable robotics and haptics for training and rehabilitation in virtual environments. She has twice received the George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching at Rice University. O’Malley was a recipient of both the ONR Young Investigator award and the NSF CAREER Award. She is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. At Rice, she has been recognized with Rice’s Presidential Award for Mentoring, the Graduate Student Association Faculty Teaching and Mentoring Award, and the Rice University Faculty Award for Excellence in Research, Teaching, and Service.
Time
Monday, April 22, 2024 at 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Location
LR3, Technological Institute Map
Contact
Calendar
McCormick - Mechanical Engineering (ME)
ME Alumni Seminar Series- Apostolos Karafillis
McCormick - Mechanical Engineering (ME)
2:00 PM
//
1.350, Ford Motor Company Engineering Design Center
Details
On the Design and Manufacture of Structures for Flightworthy Gas Turbines
by Apostolos Karafillis
Chief Consulting Engineer
Structures and Additive Design
GE Aerospace
Abstract
The design and manufacture of gas turbine components presents unique technical challenges that highlight the relevance and importance of the disciplines of mechanical and aerospace engineering. In this presentation, we will focus on describing the fundamental technical requirements for parts of flightworthy gas turbines and will then share examples of designs and innovations to meet these requirements. The talk will include the description of typical loading conditions and operating environments, and the description of how these requirements guide the selection of design features, materials, and manufacturing methods. We will discuss three specific examples: The selection of features and architecture of a bearing housing, the design of a turbine frame with a mix of metallic and composite materials, and the development of methods for characterizing the performance of components manufactured with non-traditional methods. Through these examples, it will be shown that successful hardware design requires the combination of robust design methods, rigorous implementation of the principles of mechanics of materials, and the development of design and manufacturing innovation.
Time
Tuesday, April 30, 2024 at 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Location
1.350, Ford Motor Company Engineering Design Center Map
Contact
Calendar
McCormick - Mechanical Engineering (ME)
Russ Tedrake, MIT and Toyota Research Institute, "Dexterous Manipulation with Diffusion Policies"
Center for Robotics and Biosystems (CRB)
11:30 AM
//
M416, Technological Institute
Details
Speaker: Russ Tedrake, Toyota Professor of EECS, Aero/Astro, ME at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and VP of Research at Toyota Research Institute
Title: Dexterous Manipulation with Diffusion Policies
Date and Time: Friday, May 3 at 11:30 AM CT
Location: Tech ESAM M416 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:
At the Toyota Research Institute (TRI), we've been working on behavior cloning for dexterous manipulation. Building on the Diffusion Policy framework that we've recently developed in collaboration with Shuran Song, we now have a very solid pipeline for taking ~50-100 bimanual haptic teleop demonstrations and turning that into a surprisingly effective visuomotor (+tactile) policy. Because there is no explicit state representation required, these skills work equally well manipulating deformable, liquid, or other difficult to model tasks as they do for more traditional rigid-object manipulation. We're actively scaling this up into the multi-task setting and now see a plausible path towards "Large Behavior Models". This behavior cloning pipeline is working incredibly well, and must be understood deeply in the broader context of output-feedback control. Time permitting, I'll also tell you a bit about some new results in optimization-based planning and control, and where they might fit in the age of foundation models.
Bio:
Russ Tedrake is the Toyota Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, and Aero/Astro, and he is a member of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL). He is also the Vice President of Robotics Research at Toyota Research Institute (TRI). He received a B.S.E. in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan in 1999, and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2004. Dr. Tedrake is the Director of the MIT CSAIL Center for Robotics and was the leader of MIT’s entry in the DARPA Robotics Challenge. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the MIT Jerome Saltzer Award for undergraduate teaching, the DARPA Young Faculty Award in Mathematics, the 2012 Ruth and Joel Spira Teaching Award, and was named a Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellow. His research has been recognized with numerous conference best paper awards, including ICRA, Robotics: Science and Systems, Humanoids, Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control, as well as the inaugural best paper award from the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Whole-Body Control.
Time
Friday, May 3, 2024 at 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM
Location
M416, Technological Institute Map
Contact
Calendar
Center for Robotics and Biosystems (CRB)