News

2024

Prof. Chen is honored to receive the Steven Vogel Young Investigator Award! We look forward to reporting more exciting results in 2024.

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With my colleagues Prof. Pakpong Chirarattananon, Prof. Siyi Xu, and Prof. Mirko Kovac, we will be organizing a soft robotics workshop at  ICRA 2024.

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Congratulations to Nemo who won the second place in best pictures at MARC 2024!

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Prof. Chen gave invited talks at the City University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

2023

Prof. Chen will serve as an associate editor for the International Journal of Robotics Research.

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Prof. Chen gave an invited talk at the GE Edge Symposium.

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Prof. Chen gave an invited talk at the University of Michigan Robotics Seminar.

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Prof. Chen gave an invited talk at the University of Utah Robotics Seminar.

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Prof. Chen gave an invited talk at Nodycon 2023.

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Prof. Chen received the 2023 Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Excellence in Teaching.

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Prof. Chen gave an invited talk at EuroEAP.

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Prof. Chen gave an invited talk at the MIT Robotics Seminar.

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Prof. Chen received the NSF CAREER Award! We are excited to continue our research and education efforts in the microrobotics field.

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Our robot is exhibited in the American Museum of Natural History! Prof. Chen gave an outreach talk at AMNH.

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Prof. Chen gave an outreach talk at TEDxMIT.

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Our work on insect-scale aerial robots is featured by BBC Earth Lab, in the video “Are Robot Bees The Future?” from the Planet Fix Series.

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With my colleagues Edoardo Milana, Benjamin Gorissen, Stephano Palagi, and Joon-Wan Kim, we are co-organizing a workshop on small-scale soft robotics at RoboSoft 2023.

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Our new result on damage resilient micro-aerial-robot is published as the cover article on Science Robotics! Here is a nice article from MIT News. 

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Prof. Chen gave an invited talk at SPIE-Electroactive Polymer Actuators and Devices.

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Prof. Chen gave an invited talk at UCSD’s Contextual Robotics Institute.

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Congratulations to our postdoctoral fellow Younghoon Lee who accepted a faculty offer in Mechanical Engineering at Gachon University (South Korea). Younghoon is our first postdoctoral researcher, and he will join his new position on March 1st, 2023. Congrats!

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2022

Our work on FireFly (IEEE-RAL “FireFly: An Insect-scale Aerial Robot Powered by Electroluminescent Soft Artificial Muscles”) is selected as one of MIT’s top 10 research stories of 2022. We look forward to reporting more exciting research results in 2023!

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Our work on soft-actuated aerial microrobot is featured in MathWorks Newsletters. Thank you MathWorks for supporting our students and our research!

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Prof. Chen gave an invited talk for the Institute for Robotics & Intelligent Machines (IRIM) at Georgia Tech.

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Prof. Chen gave a plenary talk at the International Conference on Manipulation, Automation and Robotics at Small Scales (MARSS 2022).

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Prof. Chen gave an invited talk at Penn State’s Mechanical Engineering Seminar Series.

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With Professor Pakpong Chiraratantanon at City University of Hong Kong, we organized a special issue in Micromachines. This special issue includes a collection of six research articles in the area of microrobotics.

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Our paper “FireFly: An Insect-scale Aerial Robot Powered by Electroluminescent Soft Artificial Muscles” is published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. See MIT News for a detailed description and video.

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Suhan and Zhijian have received the AY22-23 Mathworks Engineering Fellowship. They have been using MATLAB and Simulink extensively to characterize and control micro aerial robots. Congratulations to both!

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Prof. Chen received the 2022 IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters Outstanding Associate Editor Award.

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We are honored that our paper “Collision resilient insect-scale soft-actuated aerial robots with high agility” was selected as the recipient of the 2021 IEEE Transactions on Robotics King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Paper Award.

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With Professor Pakpong Chiraratantanon at City University of Hong Kong, we are organizing a special issue in Micromachines. We welcome submissions (before March 15th, 2022) in the broad area of microscale actuators, sensors, robotics, dynamics and control.

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With Profs. Chiraratantanon, Helbling, and Paik, we will be organizing a workshop “Challenges and Opportunities of Bio-inspired Design, Actuation, and Locomotion” at ICRA 2022. The full-day workshop will have ten speakers, panel discussions, and poster presentations. We also welcome poster and abstract submissions.

2021

Our recent paper “High Lift Micro-Aerial-Robot Powered by Low Voltage and Long Endurance Dielectric Elastomer Actuators” is published in Advanced Materials as a cover article and is included in the “Rising Stars” collection. See MIT News for a detailed description and video summary.

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Prof. Chen will present our recent development of soft aerial robots at the Vertical Flight Society (VFS). Please register here for online access (confirmation code 12121).

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Our collaborative work, “A dynanmic electrically driven soft vale for control of soft hydraulic actuators“, is published in PNAS.

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Zhijian Ren, our group’s PhD student, has received a AY21-22 Mathworks Engineering Fellowship. He has been using MATLAB and Simulink extensively to characterize and control micro aerial robots. Congratulations!

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Our recent paper is selected as one of the five winners of “RA-L Best Paper Award 2020”. See the full list here.

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Our recent work “Collision resilient insect-scale soft-actuated aerial robots with high agility” is published in IEEE Transactions on Robotics. A detailed description of our work can be found in MIT news.

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Professor Chen speaks with NPR about his work on developing a new microdrone inspired by insect flights. Full story via National Public Radio (NPR).

2019

Our recent work “Controlled flight of a microrobot powered by soft artificial muscles” is published in Nature. Selected media coverage can be found here: RoboBee powered by soft muscles.

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In a 5-minute talk at the MIT Media Lab, Professor Chen briefly introduced the functions and potential applications of insect-scale robots.

2015-2018