Search
Amazon's Robotics A.I. Group donated robot hand to Robotics Lab
Amazon's Robotics A.I. Group recently made a generous donation to the Department's Robotics Lab for research usage. The donated robotic hand, called a Shadow Hand, equipped with a BioTac sensor in each fingertip, is valued at $180,000.
Keivan Sabet
Tichakorn (Nok) Wongpiromsarn
Dr. Jia Appointed Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Robotics
Dr. Yan-Bin Jia begins to serve a three-year term (2017-2020) as an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Robotics, which has long been regarded as one of the top two journals (the other being International Journal of Robotics Research) in the field of robotics.
Dr. Jia is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Iowa State University, where he has been teaching and conducting research in robotics and geometric computing since June 1999.
NSF Grant to Support Research on Robotic Cutting of Soft Items
With a great promise for relieving people from daily chores, home robots point to a bright future of providing affordable assistance to the growing elderly population and to people with disabilities in spite of the rising costs of health care. This project by Dr. Yan-Bin Jia will aim at the development of a robotic system specialized on cutting delicate, flexible, and slippery items such as fruits, vegetables, and meats, with the possession of knife skills including slice, dice, and chop.
See more on the award here: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1651792&HistoricalAwards=false
Developmental Robotics Laboratory
Alexander Stoytchev
Robotics Laboratory
Our current research focuses on grasping of deformable objects. The problem is very different from grasping rigid ones for which two types of analysis have been developed. Form closure on a rigid object eliminates all of its degrees of freedom, while force closure keeps the object in equilibrium with the ability to resist any arbitrary external wrench. A deformable object, however, has infinite degrees of freedom, which makes form closure impossible.