Kaitlyn Becker is an assistant professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department and recipient of the Doherty Professorship in Ocean Utilization at MIT. She completed her B.S. in Mechanical Engineering at MIT in 2009, after which she worked on subcutaneous defibrillators as a manufacturing engineer for Cameron Health Inc, and then worked on the development of various nanofabrication technologies and UV water treatment as a senior engineer for Nano Terra Inc. She completed her PhD in Professor Wood’s Microrobotics Lab in 2021 and was postdoctoral researcher in Professor Mahadevan’s Soft Math lab at Harvard University. Her primary research thrust is on gentle and adaptive soft robots for grasping and manipulation from the desktop to the deep sea and focuses on novel soft robotic platforms that add functionality through innovations at the intersection of design and fabrication. Her work has been featured on the covers of the journals Soft Robotics and Advanced Functional Materials, and in the Unseen Oceans special exhibit in the American Natural History Museum. Her robotic platforms have also been successfully tested at depths down to 3.5km on research vessels including the Nautilus (Ocean Exploration Trust), Falkor (Schmidt Ocean Institute), and the Rachel Carlson (MBARI). She is a recipient of a Microsoft graduate research scholarship and a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Outside of her research and teaching in Mechanical Engineering, she also teaches glassblowing in the Department of Material Science and Engineering at MIT, where she fuses art and applied engineering in her classes. 

Human hands are remarkably adept at navigating complex and uncertain environments, gently grasping objects that we cannot fully see, and adapting to topologically complex and compliant structures. These remain particularly challenging tasks for the traditional robotic grippers that we rely on in scenarios that are impractical or dangerous for human hands. In this talk I will demonstrate the use of novel soft grippers for deep-sea biological sampling, a task that exacerbates the challenge of perception with limited visibility and complicates grasp planning with complex and compliant targets, while also demanding the gentleness of human touch under thousands of pounds of hydrostatic pressure. The soft grippers described in this talk have helped marine biologists perform unprecedented sampling tasks at depths far beyond the limits of technical divers, but this talk will also show how the compliance of soft grippers and strategically soft contact can be used on both land and sea to adapt to challenging grasping tasks. This presentation will focus on design and fabrication to increase gripper longevity and accommodate grasp uncertainty, including passive structures for conformal contact, active friction modulation for dexterous contact, and arrays of highly compliant actuators for stochastically distributed and adaptive contact.