Interactive Natural Language-based Person Search & Dynamics of Solid-Liquid Structures in Soft Robotics

Vikram Shree & Yoav Matia, Cornell University

02/11/2020

Location: Upson 106 Conference Room Next to the Lounge

Time: 2:45p.m.

Abstracts:

Vikram Shree: Interactive Natural Language-based Person Search

Today robots are equipped with rich sensors to enable different forms of interactions. Among these, using visual and natural language information is of particular interest and is commonly viewed as the most user-friendly way because of its frequent use in how humans interact with each other. One such problem that entails multi-modality of data is the task to find a person of interest (POI) in a crowd, based on natural language description about their appearance. In the talk, I will present my work on designing algorithms to systematically retrieve descriptions from a user about the POI.

Yoav Matia: Dynamics of Solid-Liquid Structures in Soft Robotics

In this work, we analyze the transient dynamics of solid-fluid composite structures. This is an interdisciplinary research subject, which lies on the border between theoretical fluid mechanics, soft-robotics and composite-structures. We focus on an elastic beam embedded with fluid-filled cavities as a representing common configuration. Beam deformation both creates and is induced by internal viscous flow, where changes to cavities’ volume are balanced by a change in axial flux. As a result, pressure gradients develop in the fluid in order to conserve mass, and stresses are induced at the solid-fluid interface; these in turn, create local moments and normal forces, deforming the surrounding solid and vice versa.

The results of the presented research can be applied to define the required geometric and physical properties of solid-fluid structures in order to achieve specific responses to external excitations, thus allowing to leverage viscous-elastic dynamics to create novel soft-actuators and solid-fluid composite materials with unconventional mechanical properties.