Cynthia Sung’s CurveQuad Breakthrough November 30, 2023 – Posted in: Uncategorized

TIP Seminar Leader Cynthia Sung continues to make waves in the field of robotics with her latest research project, a centimeter-scale quadruped featuring a curved-crease origami design, as highlighted in Penn Today. Sung is currently a Gabel Family Term Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering and Applied Science’s Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics (MEAM) Department. Sung also serves as a member of Penn’s General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) lab.

Drawing inspiration from origami inspired Contruction, Sung successfully led Penn Engineering researchers to craft a simplified approach to the design and fabrication of robots. Their creation, known as the CurveQuad, is able to self-fold, unfold, crawl, and steer using a single motor. According to Sung, since the CurveQuad is “…simple and thus relatively cheap, we imagine that similar designs can be made in the future for rapid deployment of robotic swarms,” making it highly scalable and robust.

In 2022, Sung was able to bring her knowledge and expertise of robots to TIP when she led the Soft Robots seminar. Sung taught fellows about the history and technology behind soft robots and exposed them to state-of-the-art engineering advancements in the field. The seminar explored how soft robots have the potential to change the future of manufacturing, space exploration, and medicine. Sung’s recent breakthrough with CurveQuad amplified this potential.