Kathryn Daltorio
Case Western Reserve University, OH·Engineering·Early-career
Earthworms slide through narrow burrows and around obstacles with bodies that have no rigid skeleton, bending and gripping as they go. Robots built from soft materials could do the same, reaching places rigid machines cannot, such as the inside of pipes or the human body.
- Fields
Engineering
Computer Science
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
soft robotics
bioinspired robotics
locomotion
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Test whether movement primitives built around saddle points in state space — unstable balance points rather than stable resting states — allow sensor input to steer a soft robot's trajectory without changing its underlying dynamics.
- Develop control architectures that scale spatially across the many degrees of freedom of a soft body, demonstrating recruitment of neighboring segments when a segment slips during earthworm-like locomotion.
- Build hierarchical nested responsiveness that resolves competition between passive turning caused by contact with the environment and actively commanded turning in confined spaces.
- Implement topological switchable consensus so a worm-like robot can select qualitatively different gaits, such as bracing with undulation versus peristaltic crawling, to suit different environments.
More about the research
The obstacle is control: a soft body has an enormous number of ways it can bend, and the points where it touches its surroundings keep changing as it moves. Computing a single central command for all of that at once is effectively impossible. Studies of worms suggest an alternative — complex whole-body maneuvers emerge from simple, local movements of individual body segments acting together.
Why it matters
Robots that can travel through narrow, cluttered spaces would support medical devices that move inside the body and inspection systems for pipes, conduits and aging infrastructure that are currently hard or dangerous to reach. Establishing a control vocabulary for soft bodies could make such machines practical rather than one-off prototypes.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Nathan Usevitch
Brigham Young University, UT·Engineering
Develop and experimentally test models of the energy a flywheel-powered jumping robot can store, based on flywheel shape, size, material, motor power, surrounding fluid and payload.
Maegan Tucker
Georgia Institute of Technology, GA·Engineering
Extend contraction theory, a mathematical test of whether nearby motions of a system converge, to hybrid systems that mix smooth motion with sudden impacts. Use it to estimate regions of attraction for contact-rich robots.
Aimy Wissa
Princeton University, NJ·Engineering
Identify the anatomical features and force-generating mechanisms that let flying fish taxi with only the tail fin in the water, using a comparative biomechanics approach combined with field and laboratory measurements.
The school
Case Western Reserve University: 34 labs on PI Pages, $643M a year on research, 213 research doctorates a year.
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