UMass Robotic Series: “Challenges and opportunities in designing tunable, soft mechanical sensors”

Abstract: Physically-soft mechanical sensors are poised to unlock exciting new applications in wearable devices, robotics, and human-machine interfaces. Typically with these sensors, tuning their properties through the device geometry is a challenge. A promising development in soft mechanical sensors is hierarchically-patterned structures within the sensor, which enables both deformation selectivity and the ability to tune, and potentially reconfigure, sensing properties.

I will discuss challenges and recent work related to designing and fabricating hierarchically-patterned sensors, including origami-patterned and kirigami-patterned sensors. I will also present work in enhancing the stability and mechanical selectivity of stretchable sensors, and discuss applications for such sensors in wearable healthcare applications and soft robotics.

Bio: Kris Dorsey is an associate professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physical Therapy, Movement, and Rehabilitation Sciences departments at Northeastern University. She is also currently an MLK Visiting Associate Professor at MIT in the Media Lab. She was a President's Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley and University of California, San Diego. Dr. Dorsey graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering and earned her Bachelors of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Olin College. Her current research interests include novel morphology soft sensors, stability concerns for soft-material sensors, and sensors for soft robots and wearable medical devices.