We are extremely excited to announce publication of our Nature paper in collaboration with the Sponberg lab at Georgia Tech. In this paper we combine evolutionary reconstruction, muscle physiology, nonlinear dynamics, and robots for science (robophysics!) to study how asynchronous insect muscle evolved. Congrats to Gravish lab alum and co-first author James Lynch as well as the rest of the authors. For more info you can read the paper here and checkout the UCSD news here.
Shivam’s robot work on subterranean burrowing robots (published here) has a great writeup in the UC San Diego Today. Making robots move through sand is HARD! Thankfully we have plenty of it here in San Diego :)
We are happy to announce Prof. Gravish has been promoted to Associate professor.
What a great Spring and Summer. We said goodbye to masters students Jordan Banh, Zhe Yong, Garam Kim, David Zhu, who all successfully defended their theses!
Congratulations to Wei Zhou who successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled “Design of oscillatory movement for ground-based locomotion and synchronized movement in bioinspired robotics.”
We had a fantastic time at ICRA. James presented his paper at the conference and Curtis, Emily, Wei, and James presented posters at the “Challenges and Opportunities of Bio-inspired Design, Actuation, and Locomotion” workshop.
First journal paper of the new year from Masters student Zhuonan Hao (now a PhD student at UCLA). ``Proprioceptive feedback design for gait synchronization in collective undulatory robots’’ in Advanced Robotics as part of the Adaptive Motion in Animals and Machines special issue. How to design adaptive feedback for undulatory robots to spontaneously synchronize their movements!
Congratulations to James for his paper acceptance at ICRA, “Autonomous actuation of flapping wing robots inspired by asynchronous insect muscle”. See you in Philadelphia in Spring.
Congratulations to both Mingsong (Jason) Jiang and Shivam Chopra for successfully defending their PhD theses! We wish them the best as they are off to bigger and brighter venues :)
A great start to the Summer with two papers accepted in one week! Wei Zhou’s paper was accepted to Physical Review X, and Henry Chang’s paper to Bioinspiration & Biomimetics.
We have just received a 4-year $1 million collaborative NSF grant “RAISE: Spring & Wings: Resonance in insect and engineered flight with synchronous and stretch-activated actuation” with the Agile Systems Lab at Georgia Tech.
Prof. G has been awarded the NSF Career award through the Physiological and Structural Systems program to continue studying the exemplary locomotion of small insects.
Two new preprints posted to Arxiv! One looking at the scaling of resonance in flapping “spring-wing” systems including analysis of robots and insects by James Lynch link. Second paper by Wei Zhou studying how contact interactions among oscillators causes synchronization which could help us build swarm systems that autonomously synchronize movements link.
Three papers accepted on the same day! Congratulations to Jason and Wei for their IROS paper acceptances, and Wei’s paper at Bioinspiration & Biomimetics.
Congratulations to Glenna and Jason, both had papers accepted this last month. Glenna’s work on legged locomotion on rough ground is accepted in Royal Society Open Science, and Jason’s work on rapid prototyping soft robots is accepted the Soft Robotics journal!
James and Glenna presented their work at the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology and did a great job! Abstracts for James and Glenna are available on the web. Great start to the new year!
We have just been awarded an NSF Emerging Frontiers Research Initiative (EFRI) grant as part of the soft robotics topic area! This is a four person collaboration with UCSD as the lead. Read more about the work here.
Shivam’s paper has been accepted to Smart Materials and Structures.
I am excited to be speaking at the Workshop on Locomotion and Navigation from Flies to Robots at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics. Should be really fun! More info here.
We were awarded an Innovative Research Grant from the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind. Thi initiates a collaboration between our lab and neuroscientist Dhruv Grover towards precision design of high-speed tracking optics for animal flight studies. Press announcement can be found here.
We will be presenting Jason’s paper “Sliding-layer laminates: a robotic material enabling robust and adaptable undulatory locomotion” at IROS 2018 in Madrid next week! PDF:
We were awarded an NSF EAGER to study soft-robotic foot design for optimal locomotion on complex, flowable substrates. More info can be found here.
Jacob’s school of engineering had a recent feature on Prof. G’s Bioinspired mobile robotics grad class. Details and video found here.
Postdoc Glenna Clifton is awarded a $25,000 Chancellor’s Research Excellence Scholarship entitled “Locomotor patterns in diverse ecological habitats”. Congrats Glenna!
Previous work from my post-doc getting the robobee to fly-swim-and fly again was published in Science Robotics. Learn more here and here
Our workshop Robotics-inspired biology has been accepted to IROS (28% workshop acceptance rate!). This workshop will be a full day of active discussion among robotics and biology researchers to explore research at this interface.
We have received funding from the Army Research Office for a postdoctoral position to study low-mass legged locomotion. Interested applicants can learn more here
I will be giving the biomechanics seminar at UCSD MAE on 1-12-2017. Location, SME, Room 248. Looking forward to seeing everyone!
Prof. Gravish will be giving a talk at UC Riverside on 10/31/2016.
Looking forward to seeing the San Diego robotics community come together at the contextual robotics forum the end of this month (10/28/2016). Please join us if you can!
The Gravish lab opened in the mechanical engineering department at UC San Diego.
Associate Professor, UC San Diego
Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering
Franklin Antonio Hall
Office: Room 3101
Labs: Room 3101
ngravish ATSIGN eng.ucsd.edu
