Biography

Hongying Zhang, Ph.D., started her undergraduate education at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, and got her Bachelor Degree in Mechanical Engineering in 2013. After graduation, she joined Prof. Michael Yu Wang’s lab at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, working on soft robotics with a special focus on soft dielectric sensors. In 2014, she followed Prof. Wang to the National University of Singapore, where they together with Prof. A. Senthil Kumar and Prof. Jerry Y. H. Fuh, continued and extended their research in topology optimized and 3D printable soft grippers. After her thesis defense in May, 2018, Dr. Zhang continued her research as a postdoc fellow in the Reconfigurable Robotics Lab, École Polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, where she now leads a team of two postdocs and two Ph.D. students on design and modeling of fluidic origami exoskeletons, as sponsored by Facebook, Inc. Dr. Zhang has 15 publications (Citations >149) in high impact journals, including 10 as the first author.

Abstract

Origami robots are scalable, customizable and safe, enabling them ideal to be used in medical scenarios ranging from mesoscale to microscale, e.g. drug delivery, miniaturized medical robots, artery stent and rehabilitation exoskeletons. Computational modeling of origami robots is the analytical foundations for synthesizing their mechanical properties and developing new device applications. Origami robots are built by thick panels joint with flexible sheets, resulting in a wide crease region. During the speech, I will cover how to model localized folding in the nonzero-width creased region, and further analyze the mechanics of origami robots. I will also highlight and forecast how origami will uniquely contribute to the study of medical robots with its intrinsic shape-shifting concept from two-dimensional to three-dimensional.