Benjamin Shih

Hi, my name is Ben. I'm a postdoc at Harvard's Assistive Technology Initiative, affiliated with Professor Conor Walsh in the Biodesign Lab at Harvard, David Perry in the Assistive Technology Initiative at Harvard, and Professor Lou Awad in the Neuromotor Recovery Lab at Boston University. My research interests are soft robotics, electronic skins, and wearable sensors . Broadly, I'm interested in the intersection of robotics and biology; nature exhibits so many phenomenal capabilities and I'm excited to study, replicate, and augment its embodied intelligence in machines.

My current work focuses on the "mechanical side of artificial intelligence". I seek to combine soft robotics, sensors, and machine learning to enable the next generation of robots to be better suited than today's traditionally rigid robots for interacting with and exploring their environments—physically, robustly, and safely—from both a mechanical and computational perspective. I am developing techniques for processing and understanding dense, multimodal sensors to build towards electronic skins for intelligent soft robots. These methods could, for example, enable robots to understand affective touches such as a high-five or a pat on the back. As people, we find these actions intuitive to understand. On the other hand, many robots would think that they're experiencing an earthquake based on their sensor readings. My long-term vision for tackling this challenge is to teach robots how to make sense of what they're feeling. For more about my research, please visit this page.

Previously, I was a Ph.D. student and postdoc in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering with Professor Michael T. Tolley in the Bioinspired Robotics and Design Lab (BRDL) at UC San Diego. Before that, I worked on soft legged locomotion with Professor Jamie Paik in the Reconfigurable Robotics Lab at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), studied electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, and spent time as an embedded software engineer at a gourmet food automation startup in San Francisco called Creator. During my undergrad, I also interned at MIT Lincoln Lab and Rice University.

My favorite "robots" from science fiction are Vision, Baymax, General Grievous, Doctor Octopus, and Iron Man.

CV: [pdf]

Google Scholar: [scholar]