Event

Lockheed Martin Robotics Seminar: Frank Hammond,"Adaptive Robotic Manipulation Devices"

Friday, April 28, 2017
2:00 p.m.
2216 JM Patterson
Ania Picard
301 405 4358
appicard@umd.edu

Lockheed Martin Robotics Seminar 

Adaptive Robotic Manipulation Devices for Human Augmentation

Frank L. Hammond III
Assistant Professor of ME and BME
George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology

Host

Sarah Bergbreiter

Biography
Frank L. Hammond III is Assistant Professor of ME and BME in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Prior to this appointment, he was a postdoctoral research affiliate and instructor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT and a Ford postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He received his PhD in 2010 from Carnegie Mellon University.

Dr. Hammond’s research focuses on the design and control of adaptive robotic manipulation (ARM) systems. This class of devices exemplified by kinematic structures, actuation topologies, and sensing and control strategies that make them particularly well-suited to operating in unstructured, dynamically varying environments - specifically those involving cooperative interactions with humans. The ARM device design process uses an amalgamation of bioinspiration, computational modeling and optimization, and advanced rapid prototyping techniques to generate manipulation solutions which are functionally robust and versatile, but which may take completely non-biomorphic (xenomorphic) forms. This design process removes human intuition from the design loop and, instead, leverages computational methods to map salient characteristics of biological manipulation and perception onto a vast robotics design space. Areas of interest for ARM research include kinematically redundant industrial manipulation, wearable robotic devices for human augmentation, haptic-enabled teleoperative robotic microsurgery, and autonomous soft robotic platforms