Small Robots,No Small Feat-Sarah Bergbreiter-Carnegie Melon University

Finding Genius Podcast

Richard Jacobs

Medicine, Health & Fitness

4.4 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 16 August 2019

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Robots have been helping humans since their invention in the 1950s; while there is an infinite number of purposes they can serve, robot production is constrained mostly by logistical and mechanical details. Sarah Bergbreiter, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Melon University, joins us today to discuss her work in the field of robotics. She works to create small, mobile robots – some as small as ants – as well as improving sensors and actuators that improve the capabilities of larger robots.

She calls this area of research the "intersection of microsystems and robotics." Bergbreiter discusses the possible applications of this research, from medical devices to assist with natural disaster recovery. Bergbreiter also discusses some of the challenges involved in working on small-scale robots – specifically, how different materials must interface in order to create a working robot that may only be only a few millimeters long.

For more information, visit https://www.meche.engineering.cmu.edu/directory/bios/bergbreiter-sarah.html.

Transcript

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0:58.0	Thank you. Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with the Future Tech and Future Tech
1:08.2	Health Podcast. I have Sarah Birdbrighter, she's a professor of
1:12.3	Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon and we'll be talking about her work and research and other stuff like that. So Sarah, thank you for coming.
1:20.3	Thanks for having me.
1:28.0	Tell me about your research and then maybe we'll go over backwards and see your, you know, your origins. Sure, so my research is primarily at the intersection of microsystems and robotics and there's kind of two cool areas to look at there.
1:38.5	The first one, we use microsystems to actually build tiny robots.
1:43.2	And so that goes to a robot the size of an ant that can run or walk or jump and be able to
1:52.3	get around, ultimately very tiny mobile micro robots.
	...

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