SE PhD Prospectus Defense: Akua Kodie Dickson

SE PhD Prospectus Defense: Akua Kodie Dickson

TITLE: Safe Autonomous Environmental Contact and Motion Planning for Soft Robots

ADVISOR: Andrew Sabelhaus ME

COMMITTEE: Roberto Tron ME; Alyssa Pierson ME; Sean Andersson ME

ABSTRACT: Soft robot manipulators offer the transformative potential to perform delicate tasks such as medical and surgical procedures with enhanced safety, precision, and adaptability. Their intrinsic compliance enables interaction with complex environments, making them ideal for contact-rich tasks where rigid robots may pose risks. However, this compliance introduces significant modeling and control challenges, limiting the ability of existing frameworks to achieve real-time, high-accuracy tracking with formal guarantees of force safety during environmental contact. This thesis proposes a unified, real-time, safety-critical control framework for soft robot manipulators that integrates spline-based motion planning with Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) to ensure provable safety under force and configuration constraints. The framework couples model-based tracking control with task-space safety maps that translate environmental force limits into admissible regions of the robot’s configuration space, maintaining dynamic feasibility while enforcing safety. To operate these controllers in real-time, this thesis seeks to exploit the differential flatness property of soft robot manipulators to enable real-time generation of dynamically feasible and precise motion plans. The anticipated outcome is a control framework that advances the safe and autonomous deployment of soft robot manipulators in medical, surgical, and other human-centered applications, ultimately improving human lives through real-world impact.

When 10:00 am - 12:00 pm on 4 December 2025
Building EMB 121, 15 St. Mary's St.