Invited Talk Title: Mechanical Valves for On-Board Flow Control of Inflatable Robots
Abstract: Inflatable robots are becoming increasingly popular, especially in applications where safe interactions are a priority. However, designing multifunctional robots that can operate with a single pressure input is challenging. A potential solution is to couple inflatables with passive valves that can harness the flow characteristics to create functionality. Here, simple, easy to fabricate, lightweight, and inexpensive mechanical valves are presented that harness viscous flow and snapping arch principles. The mechanical valves can be fully integrated on-board, enabling the control of the incoming airflow to realize multifunctional robots that operate with a single pressure input, with no need for electronic components, cables, or wires. By means of three robotic demos and guided by a numerical model, the capabilities of the valves are demonstrated, and optimal input profiles are identified to achieve prescribed functionalities. The study enriches the array of available mechanical valves for inflatable robots and enables new strategies to realize multifunctional robots with on-board flow control.
Bio: Katia Bertoldi is the William and Ami Kuan Danoff Professor of Applied Mechanics at the Harvard John A.Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. She earned master degrees from Trento University (Italy) in 2002 and from Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden) in 2003, majoring in Structural Engineering Mechanics. Upon earning a Ph.D. degree in Mechanics of Materials and Structures from Trento University, in 2006, Katia joined as a PostDoc the group of Mary Boyce at MIT. In 2008 she moved to the University of Twente (the Netherlands) where she was an Assistant Professor in the faculty of Engineering Technology. In January 2010 Katia joined the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University and established a group studying the mechanics of materials and structures. She is the recipient of the NSF Career Award 2011 and of the ASME’s 2014 Hughes Young Investigator Award. She serves as Editor for the journals Extreme Mechanics Letters and New Journal of Physics. She published over 150 peer-reviewed papers and several patents. For a complete list of publication and research information: https://bertoldi.seas.harvard.edu/
Dr Bertoldi’s research contributes to the design of materials with a carefully designed meso-structure that leads to novel effective behavior at the macroscale. She investigates both mechanical and acoustic properties of such structured materials, with a particular focus on harnessing instabilities and strong geometric non-linearities to generate new modes of functionality. Since the properties of the designed architected materials are primarily governed by the geometry of the structure (as opposed to constitutive ingredients at the material level), the principles she discovers are universal and can be applied to systems over a wide range of length scales.