News – Page 2 – Robotics Center

Lenzi Named U Presidential Scholar

Congratulations to University of Utah mechanical engineering associate professor Tommaso Lenzi, who was one of four faculty members names as Presidential Scholars at the University of Utah for 2023. This award recognizes excellence and achievement for faculty members at the assistant or associate professor level and comes with $10,000 in annual funding for three years to support their scholarship and enrich their research activities. Dr. Lenzi is among the top researchers of prosthetics in the country and is well known as the designer of the Utah Bionic Leg, which was selected as one of the Best Inventions of 2023 by Time...

Robotics Seminar: Human–Robot Empowerment: Human Neuromusculoskeletal Modeling For Improved Collaborative & Rehabilitative Robots

Date: Jan 23rd Time: 2-2:50pm Room: WEB L102 Title: Human–Robot Empowerment: Human Neuromusculoskeletal Modeling For Improved Collaborative & Rehabilitative Robots Abstract: Robotic systems are a promising assistive technology to augment the capabilities of both healthy users and those with motor disabilities. At the same time, those systems often fail to model important aspects of the human user, and thus act in ways that are dangerous or simply not consistent with the user’s intent. In this talk, I will give an overview of my new lab’s plans to address this challenge from multiple avenues, leveraging sensing and modeling technologies — drawn...

Zhang and Brown Receive NIH Trailblazer Award

University of Utah mechanical engineering assistant professor Haohan Zhang and Kahlert School of Computing assistant professor Daniel Brown have received a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Trailblazer Award in a multi-PI proposal. This 3-year project will develop a new neck brace for patients with dropped head syndrome that use gaze tracking to help restore head-neck mobility. The Trailblazer Awards program is a prestigious opportunity for new and early-stage faculty to pursue research programs that “integrate engineering and the physical sciences with the life and/or biomedical sciences.” Dropped head syndrome is a condition most commonly associated with neuromuscular disorders where...

Fall Robotics Seminar – Jenna Burnett

Jenna Burnett, a postdoc here at the U in the Department of Health and Kinesiology who does exciting work on biomechanics, bringing together hardware and data-driven modeling with a deep knowledge of kinesiology. Thursday, December 7th at 1pm WEB 1250 Bio: Jenna Burnett is a post-doc in the Department of Health and Kinesiology. She received a BS in Physics and Mathematics at Purdue University in 2015, before completing her MS in Kinesiology, with a focus on Biomechanics, at Iowa State University in 2017. Her master’s thesis investigated bone strain before and after a long distance run to exhaustion using...

Seminar – Designing Exoskeletons to Enhance Human Mobility

Steve Collins, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering Director, Stanford Biomechatronics Laboratory Friday, Dec. 1st at 3:00pm MEK 3550 ABSTRACT: Exoskeletons and active prosthetic limbs could improve mobility for hundreds of millions of people, but two serious challenges must first be overcome: we need ways of identifying what a device should do to benefit an individual user, and we need cheap, efficient hardware that can do it. In this talk, we will describe an approach to the design of wearable robots based on versatile emulator systems and algorithms that automatically customize assistance, which we call human-in-the-loop optimization. We will...

Abbott’s Space Junk Cleanup Research on Fox13

Local news outlet Fox 13 featured a story on mechanical engineering professor Jake Abbott's work on building robots to clean up space junk. Abbott has been working on this problem for several years and has developed a technology dubbed "Omnimagnet" for interacting with metallic, non-magnetized objects in space without touching them. In addition to the video below, you can view the Tossed in Space article highlighting this project....

Fall Robotics Seminar: Drew Sabelhaus

Drew Sabelhaus from BU, who does exciting research on soft robot design and control, will be presenting as part of the Fall Robotics Seminar. Thursday, November 9th at 1pm WEB 1250 Learn more about his research: Advancing the Safety of Soft Robots for Human Interactions Bio: Prof. Andrew Sabelhaus’ research takes a control-oriented approach to the locomotion of soft and flexible robots, spanning problems in modeling, feedback, and mechanical design. His work seeks to make soft robots practical and applicable by balancing feedback control with natural, embodied intelligence, allowing a robot to safely complete tasks in unstructured environments....

HGN Publishes Paper in MDPI Sensors

For this study, seven transfemoral amputee subjects walked on an ambulation circuit while wearing A-mode ultrasound transducers, IMU sensors, and their passive prosthesis. Our results show that A- mode ultrasound can classify ambulation mode with comparable, and in some cases, superior accuracy to mechanical sensing.his suggests that A-mode ultrasound provides additional useful information about the user’s gait beyond what is provided by mechanical sensors, and that it may be able to improve ambulation mode classification. The manuscript can be downloaded freely at this link: Sensors | Free Full-Text | Ambulation Mode Classification of Individuals with Transfemoral Amputation through A-Mode Sonomyography and...

Learning from Prosthesis Users

During a recent workshop at the IEEE World Haptics 2023 Conference assistant professor Edoardo Battaglia from the department of mechanical engineering flipped the script on the typical academic workshop. Rather than he and his colleague giving a presentation or tutorial, they brought in prosthetic users to teach the scientists about the everyday experiences of an upper limb prosthetics user. Following the event, four of the five prosthesis users joined in as coauthors on a paper, sharing their specific experiences. That paper is now being published in Science Robotics, part of the Science family of journals, which covers the “latest technological advances and...

Professors Zhang and George Receive Grant from ALS Association

Robotics professors Haohan Zhang and Jacob George received a seed grant of $50K from the ALS Association to develop new neck exoskeleton technologies to help ALS patients with dropped head syndrome to regain functional head-neck movements. This grant will partially support two graduate students for one year to conduct preliminary studies and data collection that are necessary for future, larger clinical trials that are aimed to translate the technology to ALS patients. This project will be in collaboration with the multidisciplinary Motor Neuron Disease clinic, directed by Dr. Mark Bromberg, at the University of Utah Hospital....