MAE Colloquium: Sonia Roberts (Wesleyan)

Event details Date: Tuesday, August 25, 2026 Time: 1:30 PM to 2:30 PM Location: Kimball Hall - B11 Type: Colloquium Department: Cornell Engineering About this event Soft interactions between robots and the world Traditional robotics assumes rigid bodies interacting with rigid environments. However, the real world is soft. Robots will need to be able to move over materials like sand, snow, and leaf litter, and will need to be able to interact with fruits, fabrics, and of course humans. I will discuss two types of soft interactions between a robot and the world: Robot locomotion on granular media, and the use of knitting as a computational fabrication method to create soft sensors for robots. Bio: Sonia Roberts is an assistant professor of computer science at Wesleyan University, working on morphological design problems for robots interacting with their environments in ways that are difficult to model. She is currently working in two areas: Developing soft skins for existing rigid robots, with the goal of developing fully autonomous soft, knitted robots when the technology is sufficiently advanced; and characterizing foot-ground interactions for robots running over granular media (e.g., sand). She received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2021 and completed a postdoc at Northeastern in the Institute for Experiential Robotics in 2023. Official event details: https://events.cornell.edu/event/mae-colloquium-sonia-roberts-wesleyan