Shai Revzen
Seminar Information
Most of the animals that move with legs in the world do so with six or more legs, yet humans have focused primarily on bipeds and quadrupeds in designing legged robots.
This talk will present some theoretical and experimental results that suggest that multi-legged robots with six or more legs will be easier to model and control than a typical engineering school graduate might expect. The definition and use of event-selected hybrid systems allows us to model and resolve multi-contact collisions and compute the orbital stability properties of trajectories that pass through simultaneous collision events. For slower motions, the successful application of geometric mechanics models brings us toward a surprising ansatz for modeling dry friction, leading to a fast and easy to compute model for multi-contact walking and slipping. Together our results suggest that learning how to move with many legs might be much easier than has previously been thought.
Shai Revzen is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in the University of Michigan's College of Engineering, and holds a courtesy faculty appointment in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. He received his PhD in Integrative Biology doing research in the PolyPEDAL Lab at the University of California at Berkeley, and did his postdoctoral work in the GRASP Laboratory of the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to his academic work, Shai spent a decade in the tech industry, rising to Chief Architect R&D of the convergent systems division of Harmonic Lightwaves (HLIT). He is currently co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Acculine Medical, and General Manager of his consulting company, Izun, Inc. In his spare time he does martial arts and studies for a JD Law degree at Wayne State University.