A student tries to quantify soft robot safety, with the help of a remote control car.
By Devin Hahn
When Sarah Alizadeh-Shabdiz thinks of robots, she pictures a bendy, wiggly piece of purple rubber. That’s because Alizadeh-Shabdiz, a Boston University mechanical engineering major, spent her summer doing research in BU’s Soft Robotics Control Lab. Working with Assistant Professor Andrew Sabelhaus (ME, SE), she studied novel ways to improve how soft robots are controlled, as well as the fundamental physics underlying how they interact with the environment.
Made from bendable, pliable materials, such as silicone rubber, soft robots are considered to be safer than the metal variety, but very little research has been done to quantify that. Among Alizadeh-Shabdiz’s summer research projects was an experiment, funded by a grant from the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, designed to measure the force that one of the lab’s soft robot limbs can exert on an object.
In a video on The Brink, find out why Alizadeh-Shabdiz needed the help of Toys“R”Us to complete her study, and how her love of mathematics inspires her research—and her goal of becoming a teacher.
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