Please Note the Event Location | CODA Building 9th floor Atrium

Abstract: The ability to manufacture microscale sensors and other components for robotic systems has intrigued the robotics community for almost 40 years. There have been huge success stories; MEMS inertial sensors have enabled an entire market of low-cost, small-scale UAVs. However, the promise of ant-scale robots has largely failed. Ants and other small insects like mites can move at high speeds on surfaces from picnic tables to front lawns, but few small-scale robots have moved outside the lab. This talk will present themes across our work in scaling down robotics. A common thread across our work is the use of geometry, materials, and mechanisms to do part of the robot control and computation in hardware. For example, choosing the right foot geometry and size scale can result in a 3.6 cm high power autonomous biped capable of high speed locomotion at 25 cm/s. Novel fabrication processes can be designed to tightly couple high-bandwidth actuators, sensors, and mechanisms for locomotion and manipulation tasks. Finally, even sensors can be designed to quickly and easily detect flight-relevant events. 

Bio: Sarah Bergbreiter joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University as a Professor in the fall of 2018 after spending ten years at the University of Maryland, College Park. She started her academic career with a B.S.E. degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 1999. After a short introduction to the challenges of sensor networks at a small startup company, she received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004 and 2007 with a focus on small-scale robots. Prof. Bergbreiter received the DARPA Young Faculty Award in 2008, the NSF CAREER Award in 2011, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2013 for her research on engineering robotic systems down to millimeter size scales. She has received several Best Paper awards at conferences like ICRA, IROS, and Hilton Head Workshop with her fabulous group of students and former students, and is a Fellow of the ASME. She also served as Vice Chair of DARPA’s Microsystems Exploratory Council from 2020 through 2022. Outside of academia, she enjoys spending time with her husband and two daughters, running, biking, or skiing outside rather slowly, and the rare game of water polo.