Friday, October 3, 2025 - 3:00pm
Event Calendar Category
Other LIDS Events
Speaker Name
Kaitlyn Becker
Affiliation
MIT
Building and Room number
45-230
"Mechanical Programming of Soft Robots via Fabrication-Integrated Design"
Soft robotic manipulators provide a gentle grasp where human touch cannot reach, conforming to complex shapes, distributing contact, minimizing stress concentrations, and compensating for positioning errors. This adaptability and the behavior of soft robots emerge from an interplay of materials, structures, and fabrication processes that mechanically program performance into the machine itself. While soft robotics can leverage traditional rigid machine design and manufacturing, you cannot – and should not - build a soft robot like a rigid one. Using custom digital design and optimization tools to explore task-based design and manufacturing spaces from deep-sea biological sampling to physical therapy, we can better understand what manufacturing limits most acutely constrain desirable performance. Combining manufacturing aware design tools, novel soft gripper architectures, and updated manufacturing techniques, we’re improving the reliability, adaptivity, strength, power efficiency, and sensing capabilities (proprioception and exteroception) of soft machines. In summary, I present fabrication-integrated design as a critical framework for making soft robotics more accessible, reliable, and impactful.
Kaitlyn Becker is an assistant professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at MIT, holds a class of 1948 Career Development Professorship, and leads the Fabrication-Integrated Design Lab at MIT. She works on gentle and adaptive soft robots for grasping and manipulation from the desktop to the deep sea and focuses on novel soft robotic platforms that add functionality through innovations at the intersection of design and fabrication. Her soft robots have explored oceans depths down to 3.5km and were featured on the covers of the journals Soft Robotics and Advanced Functional Materials, and in the Unseen Oceans special exhibit in the American Natural History Museum. She was a recipient of the Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Excellence in Teaching, a 2024 IEEE RoboSoft Rising Star award, and the Doherty professorship in Ocean Utilization. Prior to joining the Mechanical engineering department at MIT, she completed her PhD at Harvard in the Microrobotics Lab in 2021.