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Fall 2024 GRASP Seminar: James Bern, Williams College, “Mixed Reality Soft Robots and Accessible CAD Software”
November 14 @ 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
*This seminar was held in-person in Levine 307 as well as virtually… This seminar was NOT recorded.
ABSTRACT
This talk has two parts. First, I will explain our recent work on making it easier to control 3D soft robots. By extending our prior work on soft robot inverse kinematics (Soft IK) into virtual reality (VR), we realize an intuitive, real-time posing pipeline for arbitrary 3D soft robots. This pipeline promises to extend to mixed reality applications. Second, I will introduce a new experimental CAD program called Conversation. Conversation enables novice users to quickly design simple 3D-printed machines. The software features a unique workflow (2D sketch and 3D part remain separate), utilizes an unconventional mesh-based geometry kernel (Manifold), and is very fast (go from DXF to STL in seconds – minutes) and very small (executable weighs ~1 MB). It is also a promising target for new computational design algorithms.
Presenter
James Bern - Learn More
James Bern is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Williams College, where he researches Soft Robotics and Computer-Aided Design and teaches Computer Graphics, Data Structures, and Robotics and Digital Fabrication. James is interested in 1) How do we model complex physical phenomena that change unpredictably over time? 2) How can we efficiently navigate massive design and control spaces? 3) How do we put new computational tools into the hands of artists, designers, and the general public?