Cagdas Onal
Worcester Polytechnic Institute, MA·Engineering
Many people who use wheelchairs or live with disabilities struggle with everyday reaches: taking a cup from a shelf, or opening a cabinet door or drawer. Most assistive devices handle these tasks poorly.
- Fields
Engineering
Biomedical Engineering
Computer Science
- Topics
soft robotics
continuum robots
origami robots
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Develop a modular, origami-inspired continuum robot arm (CoBRA) with customizable design algorithms, so the arm can be tailored to specific assistive tasks in homes and healthcare settings.
- Integrate proprioceptive sensing, in which the robot senses its own bending, with real-time smooth inverse kinematics so the arm can adapt to external loads and avoid obstacles while moving precisely.
- Apply clothoid-based visual servoing (camera-guided motion along smooth curves) and model predictive control so the arm interacts safely and accurately with objects such as cups and doors.
- Evaluate the robots iteratively on real-world use cases, including carrying a full cup of water without spilling and opening and closing doors.
More about the research
Rigid robot arms can be heavy and unsafe near people. This project asks whether soft, flexible robot arms can do these jobs safely inside homes and healthcare settings.
Why it matters
Soft assistive arms could help people with disabilities and wheelchair users reach shelves, cabinets and drawers on their own, supporting independent living and easing caregivers' workload. The grant notes that advances in designing and controlling soft robots may also find uses in manufacturing and service industries. The team also plans to explore translating the technology to the robotics and healthcare industries.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Yu She
Purdue University, IN·Engineering
Detect early signs of apple scab, fire blight and powdery mildew in apple orchards using drones carrying multispectral and thermal cameras.
Suyi Li
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, VA·Engineering
Explore how complex mechano-intelligence (sensing, memory and decision-making carried out by a structure itself) can become when origami acts as a mechanical neural network through physical reservoir computing.
Momotaz Begum
University of New Hampshire, NH·Computer Science
Develop learning-from-demonstration (LfD) algorithms that learn a task's safety features from human video demonstrations and filter out demonstrations that would teach the robot unsafe behavior.
The school
Worcester Polytechnic Institute: 6 labs on PI Pages, $72M a year on research, 69 research doctorates a year.
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