12/10/2015 Fatima Farha, MechSE Communications 3 min read
In October, Hae-Won Park made his way to Urbana-Champaign to start his position as an assistant professor in MechSE.
Written by Fatima Farha, MechSE Communications
When he was preparing to complete his senior year in mechanical engineering at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea, he realized he was unsure whether to pursue industry or academia.
But Park said he got lucky. He was given the opportunity to do an independent study with a professor at his university on robotics research, and was introduced to robotics systems through a project that involved building small locomotion robots, or robots that can move. This led to a decision to pursue this area of research, and Park received his master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Yonsei and later his PhD from the University of Michigan.
During his PhD work at Michigan, Park conducted research on a bipedal locomotion robot named MABEL. He was quite successful with MABEL—it was featured at the Chicago Field Museum as a part of an exhibition called, “The Machine Inside: Biomechanics”—and work on the MIT Cheetah 2 (now at the Boston Technology Museum) followed during his postdoctoral position at MIT.
Park said he is intrigued by how animals are able to move without letting their surroundings slow them down. He began working with locomotion systems to incorporate dynamic animal traits – from snakes, fish, and humans, among others – into their robotic counterparts. One of his most important projects to date was developing the quadrupedal Cheetah 2, in which he focused on developing the hardware for robots to walk on terrain without any information about the terrain itself. Cheetah 2 has a visual system on its head to detect and measure obstacles at a certain distance in order to calculate when to jump.
“I am always amazed at how biological animals can maneuver dynamically with efficient movements in complex environments without significantly slowing down. The Cheetah 2 project focused on mobility and speed,” Park said. “Not only could we make it run fast, we could also make it jump over obstacles while running.”
His research group in MechSE – the Dynamic Robotics Laboratory – works on state-of-the-art control and mechanical design to achieve highly efficient, agile, and robust dynamic behaviors in robot systems. They use modeling, simulation, and control techniques and study biological systems to develop simulated actions that rival those of the robots’ biological counterparts.
While robotic animals like the Cheetah 2 are fun to watch in action, Park anticipates several real-world applications from his work, including use in unsafe environments for disaster response and search-and-rescue operations, as well as for human prosthetics and exoskeletons.
“After the tsunami in Japan, it was dangerous to send people inside the destroyed nuclear plant due to the radiation. During events like this, a robot could be used to investigate and prevent further damage,” he said.
Overall, Park is excited to be at the University and he hopes to explore collaborations with other faculty in engineering.
“I didn’t imagine that I would become a professor in the United States,” he said. “That was not in my picture, actually. You cannot always predict what’s going to happen. But I am going to keep working hard and produce things that are useful.”