The Department of Mechanical, Materials, and Aerospace Engineering presents the 2024–2025 seminar series featuring Amy Wu, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering at Queen’s University and the Mitchell Professor in Bio-Inspired Robotics. Wu will present “Toward Robot Companions: How Legged Robots Affect Human Gait Behavior.” This seminar will take place on Wednesday, September 18, 2024, from 12:45–1:45 p.m. in room 104 of the Rettaliata Engineering Center.

Abstract

A world embedded with robots seems inevitable. One challenge, however, is designing robots to work with us, not against us. It is unclear how assistive legged robots, such as robot companions, would affect activities of human daily living, such as walking. To inform the design of controllers that enable seamless human-robot interaction during walking tasks, we first sought to determine whether legged robots could affect human walking behavior. I will discuss two studies we conducted with human participants and quadrupedal robots walking side by side. We compared human behavior with and without the robot and found that legged robots can affect human gait even without physical interactions, which has implications for the design of robot companions or monitoring robots. Robots have the potential to greatly improve human lives, but we should ensure they are designed to interact well with us to minimize mechanical and possibly energetically related consequences from human-robot interaction.

Biography

Amy R. Wu is an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering at Queen’s University and the Mitchell Professor in Bio-Inspired Robotics. She is the head of the Biomechanics x Robotics Laboratory (BxRL) and a member of Queen’s Ingenuity Labs Research Institute. Her research interests are at the intersection of biomechanics and robotics with the aim of augmenting legged mobility. Prior to joining Queen’s, she was a postdoctoral researcher in the Biorobotics Laboratory at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland and completed her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan.