Mechanical Engineering Professor Cagdas Onal and Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Jie Fu Receive 2017 National Science Foundation Award

Congratulations to WPI Mechanical Engineering Professor Cagdas Onal and Electrical and Computer Engineering  Professor Jie Fu for their recent award entitled “Intelligent Soft Robot Mobility in the Real World” sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF).  The objective of this proposal is to endow snake-like soft robots with intelligence in navigating real-world environments autonomously using a hierarchical control approach from low-level functions and motion primitives to high-level locomotion tasks. To achieve this objective, Onal and Fu are studying new scalable modular architectures and distributed control and motion planning principles for soft, snake-like robots to operate in narrow passages, maze-like structures, and non-flat surfaces that can be encountered in disaster response applications.