Lab News 2019-20
August 21, 2020
Laura (Song) Wu presented her SURI poster today during the ME Department's virtual event. In addition, Bryce Huerta (NSF REU program), Sochima Ezema (CS REU program), and Steven Trinh participated in remote research this summer. Thank you all for your contributions to CHARM research!
July 25, 2020
Congratulations to CHARM Lab members who have recently started (or are about to start) new jobs!
- Melisa Orta Martinez is an Assistant Professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University
- Laura Blumenschein is an Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University
- Ming Luo is an Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering at Washington State University
- Nathan Usevitch is at Facebook Reality Labs in Redmond, WA
July 24, 2020
The paper "AFREEs: Active Fiber Reinforced Elastomeric Enclosures", published in the proceedings of the 2020 IEEE International Conference on Soft Robotics, was nominated for the Best Paper Award. Congratulations to authors Kyle Yoshida, XinYi Ren, Laura Blumenschein, Allison Okamura, and Ming Luo.
June 5, 2020
CHARM Lab partial research re-opening is starting, with training, contact tracing, social distancing, and sanitizing protocols in place. Be safe, everyone!
June 8, 2020
Allison gave a keynote talk at Virtual ICRA 2020 on "Haptics for Humans in a Physically Distanced World." View the talk here: https://ieeetv.ieee.org/conference-highlights/icra-2020-keynote-haptics-for-humans-in-a-physically-distanced-world
June 5, 2020
Allison presented at the world-wide virtual Robotics Today seminar. The video, "Soft Robot for Humanity", also includes commentary about anti-racism and diversity in robotics.
June 5, 2020
Congratulations to Dr. Melisa Orta Martinez, Dr. Cole Simpson, and Dr. Nathan Usevitch for submitting their theses! This year's CHARM Ph.D. graduates are honored with a virtual hooding here, and the officially ME celebration of graduates is here.
June 1, 2020
Congratulations to the CHARMers and many other Stanford robotics labs who presented their work at Virtual ICRA 2020! A list of Stanford papers is here -- a whopping 40 papers by my count!
May 5, 2020
Congratulations to Nathan Usevitch on passing his (online) PhD defense!
April 27, 2020
Congratulations to Cole Simpson on passing his (online) PhD defense!
April 15, 2020
Our collaboration with the Nanoscale Prototyping Laboratory on their "enhanced face mask project" was featured on Stanford news.
March 18, 2020
Nathan Usevitch and Zachary Hammond's article on Isoperimetric Truss robots was published in Science Robotics and attracted some media attention.
https://news.stanford.edu/2020/03/18/squishy-shape-changing-bot-roams-untethered/ https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-hardware/stanford-giant-soft-robot-inflatable-tubes https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/baymax-on-mars-shapeshifting-soft-robot-stanford-university
February 20, 2020
Congratulations to Julie Walker for successfully defending (and later submitting) her thesis! Julie will join Intuitive Surgical in April. The photo below shows Julie (and Allison) during Julie's post-defense celebration with several of the students Julie mentored during her PhD.
February 20, 2020
Brian Do's work was featured on Stanford's Instagram!
February 16, 2020
Recent CHARM PhD Graduate Yuhang Che’s work was featured by Stanford HAI: https://hai.stanford.edu/news/tech-adapts-people-tug-right-direction
“Tech that Adapts to People: A Tug in the Right Direction: As robots move out of isolated settings into everyday environments, they need to do more than react to people, says Yuhang Che, who received his PhD in mechanical engineering at Stanford in 2019 and is now a software engineer in motion planning at Waymo. Robots need to communicate in ways that yield predictable human responses.”
December 2, 2019
Welcome baby Lucy! Congratulations to Nathan and Andrea (as well as big brothers Peter and Owen.)
October 29, 2019
The vine robot invention, along with Allison, Elliot, Laura, and Margaret C., were featured on "Henry Ford's Innovation Nation with Mo Rocca" on CBS!