Meet CBI Fellow Kiyn Chin

My name is Kiyn Chin and I am excited to pursue my research at Carnegie Mellon University as a Carnegie Bosch Institute postdoctoral fellow. I earned my Ph.D. at CMU, studying the control of soft robotic systems and the fabrication of soft electronics from compliant biomaterials. 

What are your long term goals?

In the long term, I aim to advance robotics technology towards safer, more sustainable, and more accessible architectures via circular design practices and the development of sustainable soft robotic hardware. I hope to implement compliant and lightweight soft robotic mechanisms that provide intrinsic safety during interactions with delicate objects and living things with novel bio-derived and biodegradable materials that have low financial and environmental costs throughout their life cycle. I plan to evaluate these biomaterial mechanisms in robotic manipulation tasks and to characterize their biodegradability to enable design iteration on the entire development pipeline, from manufacturing to task deployment and end-of-life impact. 

How do you hope this fellowship will help address those goals?

The interdisciplinary nature of the Carnegie Bosch Institute provides a uniquely supportive environment for my work. During my fellowship term, I will be relying on the technical resources and industry experience of Bosch to provide strong guidance on the logistics of preparing novel robotics technology for real-world translation, as well as deeper insight into data-driven modeling techniques for controlling complex physical systems. I also intend to form collaborations with CMU faculty across domains to support the complex interconnected challenge of system-level changes to robotics and materials technology. 

What are the big challenges you hope to solve? 

One exciting challenge in this work is the translation of synthesis and manufacturing techniques for biologically-derived polymer networks from internal applications like tissue engineering and drug encapsulation into more mechanically robust forms, akin to the way these biopolymers function to support the robust structure of living things. I aim to integrate manufacturing and processing knowledge from synthetic materials science into that biomedical foundation to bridge the gap. The other major research challenge to overcome is enabling the control of these systems to perform useful physical tasks once manufactured. Analytical modeling of soft robotic structures is a high-dimensional and deeply nonlinear problem, so control strategies must be adaptive and data-efficient.

Any obstacles you see in addressing the problems?

The main obstacles stem from the complexity and variability of working with soft and biologically-derived materials. While effectively controlling soft synthetic materials already requires a higher level of model complexity than contemporary rigid robotic systems, the inclusion of biologically-derived materials introduces non-standardized material properties that vary batch-to-batch. Additionally these materials respond to changes in the environment that invalidate static predictive modeling. To address these challenges, system models and control policies must incorporate instance-specific data collection about initial properties, as well as leverage continual operational data. The more instances of these systems that are built in different contexts, the clearer the solutions to this variability will become.

How do you hope to see the impact of this work out in the world?

By lowering the costs and ecological impact of building robotics hardware, I hope to allow for the kind of large scale data collection on robotic hardware necessary to enable the development of embodied autonomous systems that can safely function in domestic environments. Additionally, in a time where one form of artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly ubiquitous, the environmental and social costs of automation technology face increasing scrutiny. By creating an incarnation of automation technology that has as few barriers to individual adoption as possible, while maintaining a sustainability and safety ethic, I hope to broaden the public understanding of what that technology can be, and ensure people have a chance to develop a vision of a future where this technology serves their needs. 

The application process for the next round of CBI fellows will open up on December 15.  Be sure to check the CBI website again soon to learn more and apply to join Chin as part of our CBI team.