Event

Lockheed Martin Robotics Seminar: Kamran Mohseni, "Bioinspired Aerial and Underwater Robots"

Friday, October 28, 2016
2:00 p.m.
2121 JM Patterson
Ania Picard
301 405 4358
appicard@umd.edu

Lockheed Martin Robotics Seminar

Bioinspired Aerial and Underwater Robots: Design, fabrication, and mathematical modeling challenges

Kamran Mohseni
Professor and W.P. Bushenell Endowed Chair
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Institute for Networked Autonomous Systems
University of Florida

Host

Derek Paley

Abstract
This talk reports on the development of underwater and aerial robots in my group using integrated actuation and sensing techniques inspired by natural flyers and swimmers. In particular, we report on vortex locomotion techniques inspired by cephalopods and the development of an epidermal line of sensory system for environmental flow sensing and feedback. Techniques for identification of motion primitives and actuator placement in soft robotics will be discussed.  On the aerial side, I report on the development of a 5 gram full state autopilot and the discovery of ‘roll stall’ and its associated resonant instability mode in low aspect ratio flyers which is a significant contributor to jittery nature of small scale flight.  Finally, time permitting, a symplectic model reduction of general dynamical systems will be presented where the reduction process respects the symplectic structure of the governing equations. This is quite important in order to obtain a reduced model of a high dimensional robot that respects the dynamical properties of the original system such as system energy.

Biography 
Kamran Mohseni received his PhD from the California Institute of Technology in 2000. After a year of postdoc in control and dynamical systems he joined the University of Colorado in Boulder as an assistant Professor of Aerospace Engineering Sciences. He is now a Professor and W.P. Bushenell Endowed Chair in the departments of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) and Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of Florida. He is currently the director of the Institute for Networked Autonomous Systems at the University of Florida.