Kod*lab Profile: Sonia Roberts – How can a robot use less energy when it runs on sand?
Kod*lab Profile: Sonia Roberts – How can a robot use less energy when it runs on sand?
Sonia Roberts, an experimentalist at heart and PhD researcher with Kod*lab, a legged robotics group within the GRASP Lab at Penn Engineering takes us inside her scientific process. How can a robot’s controllers help it use less energy as it runs on sand? Sonia walks us through the three stages of her experiments, from simulation and physical emulation to the physical world. We learn that underlying her discoveries are granular media physicists’ models, a careful, methodical process of changing one parameter at a time, and her years of experience bringing robots to deserts.
This work was supported by NSF NRI-2.0 grant 1734355 and NSF INSPIRE grant 1514882.
