Seminar with Joon-hyuk Park

Speaker:
Joon-hyuk Park, Ph.D.
NRC Research Associate
US Army Research Lab

Title:
Wearable robots: "How to befriend robots on humans"

Abstract:
Wearable robotics – exoskeletons or exosuits – is a rapidly growing research area in the robotics community across academia, industry and government.  The use of this technology has been dramatically increased over the past decade for a range of applications, such as gait rehabilitation of stroke patients (enable), assisting industrial workers during strenuous manual tasks (assist) or extending physical functions and performance of soldiers (augment). However, considerable gaps and challenges remain in current wearable robots that limit their practicality, usability and effectiveness.  The core question I aim to address through research is “How do we make wearable robots befriend to humans?”  The first part of this talk will introduce the three essential research areas that will lead us to the answer:  i) Ergonomic design and human-in-the-loop control, ii) Wearable sensor networks for sensing, learning and adapting human activity/intent, and iii) computational tools and techniques for modeling and predicting human-robot interactions and human-robot system performance.  The second part of the talk will describe general research methodologies used in wearable robotics R&D by showing the process of three different wearable upper body robot developments as examples.  The last part of the talk will summarize what are involved and needed in the wearable robotics research, and share my visions, strategic plans and multidisciplinary approaches, with an open discussion at the end.

Bio:
Dr. Park is currently a National Research Council Postdoctoral Research Fellow working as a visiting scholar at the US Army Research Lab. He received a PhD degree in Mechanical Engineering at Columbia University in 2016, and has BS and MS degrees in Mechanical and Aerospace engineering focused on bio-inspired mechanism design and control of micro aerial robots.

 His area of research is wearable technologies, particularly wearable robots for physical augmentation and rehabilitation, and wearable sensor networks for real-time monitoring/assessment of various human activities and states. His research employs multidisciplinary approaches to address complex problems in 1) the design and control of assistive and rehabilitative wearable robots, 2) real-time sensing and prediction of human movements, intents and states, and 3) developing experimental and computational tools/techniques to assess human-robot interactions and the resulting effects on human performance/adaptation.  Dr. Park was a recipient of the NASA graduate fellowship in 2011, the ASME Mechanisms and Robotics Conference Best Paper Award (Honorable Mention) in 2015, and the National Academy of Science Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (NRC-RAP) from 2016 to 2019. (Contact: joon.park@columbia.edu)