Lab News 2020-21

August 25, 2021

Congratulations to Millie Salvato for receiving a DAAD Fellowship!

August 14, 2021

We had a long-awaited lab retreat in Butano State Park and Bean Hollow State Beach.

July 9, 2021

Assistant Professor of Computer Science at USC and former CHARM Lab postdoc Heather Culbertson won the 2021 IEEE Technical Committee on Haptics Early Career Award. She gave a special talk and received the award today at the virtual IEEE World Haptics Conference. Congratulations, Heather!

July 6, 2021

Congratulations to CHARMers presenting their work at the 2021IEEE World Haptics Conference!

  • Caitlyn Seim presented her WHC paper: C. Seim, B. Ritter, K. Flavin, M. G. Lansberg, and A. M. Okamura, "Impressions of Vibrotactile Signals in Older Adults With and Without History of Stroke"
  • Sophia Williams presented her ToH paper: S. Williams and A. M. Okamura, "Body-Mounted Vibrotactile Stimuli: Simultaneous Display of Taps on the Fingertips and Forearm"
  • Mine Sarac presented TWO work-in-progress papers: M. Sarac, K. Hallett, J. Saunders, B. Makled and A. M. Okamura, "Augmented Needle Decompression Task with a Wrist-Worn Haptic Device" and M. Sarac, D. Loke, M. Evans, O. Chong, J. Saunders, B. Makled, A. M. Okamura, and K. Hallett, "Augmented Haptic Guidance for Needle Insertion with a 2-DoF Wrist-Worn Haptic Device"
  • Cara Welker presented her work-in-progress paper: C. G. Welker, S. H. Collins, and A. M. Okamura, "Human Perception of Wrist Torque Magnitude During Upper and Lower Extremity Movement"
  • Crystal Winston presented her work-in-progress paper: C. Winston, K. T. Yoshida, S. R. Williams and A. M. Okamura, "Embedded Laser-Cut Constraints for Elastomeric Soft Actuators"

June 13, 2021

We celebrated graduation and had an in-person hooding of PhD graduates at Allison's house with CHARM Lab members and their families. Ph.D. graduates from the CHARM lab in 2021 are pictured below, left to right: Margaret Coad in ME who is starting a faculty job at Notre Dame AME this summer, Cara Welker in BioE who will be faculty at University of Colorado ME in 2022 after a postdoc at Michigan, Sophia Williams in EE who is a research engineer at Auris Health (medical robotics company within J&J), and Cara Nunez in BioE who is going to be a faculty member at Cornell MAE after a postdoc (TBD). We also celebrated some of our 2021 MS graduates and also MS and PhD 2020 graduates.

June 1, 2021

Congratulations to CHARMers presenting their work at the 2021 ICRA conference! Our papers were:

  • B. H. Do, A. M. Okamura, K. Yamane, and L.H. Blumenschein, "Macro-Mini Actuation of Pneumatic Pouches for Soft Wearable Haptic Displays"
  • Z. Chua, A. M. Jarc and A. M. Okamura, "Toward Force Estimation in Robot-Assisted Surgery using Deep Learning with Vision and Robot State"
  • R. Jitosho, N. Agharese, A. Okamura, and Z. Manchester, "A Dynamics Simulator for Soft Growing Robots"

May 27, 2021

Cara Gonzalez Welker successfully defended her PhD thesis! Images below include Cara at her defense, with her committee, and celebrating with friends and family. Congratulations, Cara!

May 21, 2021

Margaret Coad successfully defended her PhD thesis! Images show Margaret with her defense committee on zoom and celebrating with friends after. Congratulations, Margaret!

May 5, 2021

Sophia Willams successfully defended her PhD thesis! Images show Sophia with her defense committee on zoom and celebrating with her parents after. Congratulations, Sophia!

April 16, 2021

YouTube channel Veritasium made a video about our vine robot, done in collaboration with Elliot Hawkes's lab.

February 18, 2021

YouTube channel Veritasium made a video about our shape-changing isoperimetric robot, done in collaboration with Sean Follmer and Mac Schwager's labs.

February 12, 2021

Our vine robot navigation work was featured in the ‘Video Friday’ section of the IEEE Spectrum website.

January 1, 2021

Congratulations to Caitlyn Seim for being awarded a 2021 Interdisciplinary Scholar Award (postdoc fellowship) from the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford University!

October 7, 2020

Congratulations to Sophia Williams for being awarded a Stanford Robotics Center fellowship sponsored by FANUC!

October 3, 2020

Allison participated in Nosakhare (Nosa) Edoimioya‘s “How to do Grad School” podcast. You can listen to the recording at one of these locations:

September 10, 2020

Congratulations to Margaret Coad, Sang-Goo Jeong, Laura Blumenschein, Ming Luo, Usman Mehmood, and Jee-Hwan Ryu for our paper "A Tip Mount for Transporting Sensors and Tools using Soft Growing Robots" being a finalist for the 2020 IROS Best Paper Award on Robot Mechanisms and Design sponsored by ROBOTIS.