How an open door led to fulfilling a robotics dream

October 7, 2021
Professor Jessy Grizzle shows Victor Popa-Simil a Cassie robot with a lidar sensor on top.
Professor Jessy Grizzle shows Victor Popa-Simil a Cassie robot with a lidar sensor on top. Papa-Simil, who studied remotely in 2020, utilized that lidar data while taking ROB 101.

Victor Popa-Simil, an engineering undergraduate, recently shared this letter he sent to Professor Jessy Grizzle, Director of the Robotics Institute, earlier this year:

Dr. Grizzle,

My name is Victor Popa-Simil and I was in your ROB 101 class last semester. I’m a freshman from Los Alamos, New Mexico looking to go into biomedical engineering (robotic integration in the medical field). I’m not sure if you remember, but I walked into your office about 5 years ago and we had a conversation that shaped my educational career.

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$1.7M to build everyday exoskeletons to assist with lifting, walking and climbing stairs

October 4, 2021
A model of the powered exoskeleton on the hip, knee and ankle joints. The modular system will be able to assist any combination of these joints, no matter the activity. Credit: Locomotor Control Systems Laboratory, University of Michigan

In an effort to bring robotic assistance to workers, the elderly and more, a University of Michigan team is developing a new type of powered exoskeleton for lower limbs—funded by $1.7 million from the National Institutes of Health.

One in eight Americans faces a mobility disability, with serious difficulty walking or climbing stairs, but a robotic solution could be far less bulky than sci-fi’s full-body suits. The U-M team plans to develop a modular, powered exoskeleton system that could be used on one or multiple joints of the legs. The three-year project will first study workers who lift and lower objects and the elderly who have lost mobility with age. In future work, the team would like to include people with other disabilities.

“Imagine adding a small motor to a bicycle—the rider still pedals, but there’s that extra power to get up hills without breaking too much of a sweat,” said project lead Robert Gregg, member of the Robotics Institute and associate professor of electrical and computer engineering.

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Announcing the 2021 Robotics Outreach Ambassadors

August 31, 2021

Robotics can inspire, and we can leverage that power to create more roboticists, keep the public properly informed on its future, and ensure robotics meets our vision of a field that improves society.

To do much of this outreach, we rely on our students. These students find time among classes and research to meet with children, middle and high schoolers, prospective graduate students and faculty, local and national community members, and media. The students present their work, run classes and demonstrations, and build up our own community–activities that bolster the culture and values of the University of Michigan Robotics Institute.

Wami Ogunbi explains the latest robots to visitors after the first Robotics Colloquium organized by Andrea Sipos and Michael Gonzalez with the Robotics Student Graduate Council.
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Rubble-roving robots use hands and feet to navigate treacherous terrain

August 13, 2021

Humans are adept at using our hands to keep our balance, whether by grabbing a railing as we climb stairs, walking with help from a cane, or gripping a strap on the subway. Now, University of Michigan researchers have enabled humanoid robots to use their hands in a similar way, so the robots can better travel across rough terrain, such as disaster areas or construction sites.

“In a collapsed building or on very rough terrain, a robot won’t always be able to balance itself and move forward with just its feet,” said Dmitry Berenson, professor of electrical and computer engineering and core faculty in the Robotics Institute. 

“You need new algorithms to figure out where to put both feet and hands. You need to coordinate all these limbs together to maintain stability, and what that boils down to is a very difficult problem.”

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