Ali Leylavi Shoushtari will present a webinar, “Soft Agro-food Robotics,” on Wednesday, June 23, 2021 at 15:00 CEST (UTC +2). See the conversion to other time zones using this time zone announcement.
Please register for the webinar; we use the Zoom webinar provider. The webinar is free and open to the public.
Ali is a postdoctoral researcher at Wageningen University & Research.
Abstract.
Illustration of soft gripper materials used for manipulating fresh produce (1), a robot with a soft gripper grasping an apple (2), and panels demonstrating the action of the soft grippers on apple, broccoli, lettuce, and orange over five time steps.
Soft Robotics is a young yet promising field of research aimed to enhanced robots’ safety and adaptability while keeping them simple and affordable. In agro-food robotics, crops are usually delicate, having high variability (i.e. different shape, size, surface texture/roughness and softness) and are affected by environmental conditions e.g. moisture and dust which makes them challenging to handle using conventional rigid robots. The above-mentioned features of soft robotics can significantly contribute to the robots’ versatility, making it a perfect solution for the agro-food robotic challenges.
To achieve this goal, I try to answer the question of how and to what extent soft robotics can enhance the versatility of robots specially in grasping and manipulation. In particular, I would present two main approaches toward soft versatile robots i.e. engineering-based and bio-inspired design of novel soft robotic components with some research examples. For instance I will present some works on morphing grippers that can passively adapt to the object with complex shapes together with an active adhesive interface for safely handling delicate crops.
Presenter Biography.
Ali Leylavi Shoushtari received his PhD in Biorobotics from Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa. During his PhD he designed and developed Bio-inspired inverse kinematic algorithm for anthropomorphic robotic manipulators, and designed and developed a unified motion planning and compliance control framework for an upper-arm Neuro-rehabilitation robotic task. Later on he has pursued research on design, fabrication and modeling of soft origami actuators at the Center for Micro-BioRobotics (CMBR), IIT as a postdoctoral researcher. In 2019 he joined the Farm Tech Group at Wageningen University & Research and is currently working on soft adhesive grippers for delicate crop handling. The project is in collaboration with the Experimental Zoology Group, and the Group of Physical Chemistry and Soft Matter. His research is mainly focused on how soft robotics can enhance versatility of the agricultural robots. USORO (Universal Soft Robotic Harvester for Intercropping) is an example where they are investigating the potential of soft robots in agriculture and food contexts.