Stanford Seminar - When Design = Planning

May 10, 2024 Cynthia Sung, UPenn Robot design is an inherently difficult process that requires balancing multiple different aspects: kinematics and geometry, materials and compliance, actuation, fabrication, control complexity, power, and more. Computational design systems aim to simplify this process by helping designers check whether their designs are feasible and interdependencies are satisfied. But what can we say about when a design that accomplishes a task even exists? Or what the simplest design that does a job is? In this talk, I will discuss recent work from my group in which we have discovered that, in some cases, design problems can be mapped to problems in robot planning, and that results derived in the planning space allow us to make formal statements about design feasibility. These ideas apply to systems as varied as traditional robot arms, dynamical quadrupeds, compliant manipulators, and modular truss structures. I will share examples from systems developed in my group and forecast forward on the implications of these results for future robot co-design. About the speaker: https://sung.seas.upenn.edu/people/sung/ More about the course can be found here: https://stanfordasl.github.io/robotics_seminar/ View the entire AA289 Stanford Robotics and Autonomous Systems Seminar playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoROMvodv4rMeercb-kvGLUrOq4HR6BZD ► Check out the entire catalog of courses and programs available through Stanford Online: https://online.stanford.edu/explore