Outreach

2023

Our robot is exhibited in the American Museum of Natural History! Please visit the new Solomon Family Insectarium to check out our robot and research stories!

Prof. Chen gave public outreach talks at TEDxMIT and the American Museum of Natural History.

2022

Prof. Chen gave a talk at Georgia Tech’s robotics seminar series.

Our graduate student Nemo Hsiao gave a fascinating outreach talk on micro-flying-robots.

MIT Curiosity Correspondent Abby Haley and Professor Chen put together a video for K12 students on the science of flying insects: Ask MIT: Bees! feat. Professor Kevin Chen.

2021

Professor Chen delivered a keynote talk at ICRA 2021, sharing our research progress on agile and robust micro-aerial-robots powered by soft artificial muscles.

Professor Chen discussed his recent works on the IEEE Soft Robotics Podcast with Marwa Eldiwiny.

2020

We co-organized a soft-robotics workshop with Prof. Hao Su’s group at The City University of New York (CUNY). This workshop is entitled “Challenges and Opportunities of Soft Robotics Workshop: Research, Applications, and Education”, and it is one of the five workshops at AIM 2020. If you are interested, please visit the website for more information. In addition to all the inspiring talks, Prof. Chen gives a presentation on our recent progress on developing soft-actuated aerial robots.

2019

Prof. Chen co-organized a workshop “Marine Bio-inspired Soft Robotics” with Prof. Li Wen (Beihang University), Prof. Marcello Calisti (Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna) and Prof. Hannah Stuart (UC Berkeley) at IROS 2019. It included invited talks and panel discussions on topics including underwater adhesion, swimming, multimodal locomotion, manipulation, etc. In a brief talk together with Prof. Stuart, Prof. Chen introduced our several recent works.

Prof. Chen gave a teaser talk at the Imagination in Action event organized by the MIT media lab. He introduced the locomotive capabilities of insect-scale robots, the challenges and potential applications relating to these systems.

2018 and earlier

Prof. Chen was a graduate student at the Harvard Microrobotics lab. As a member of the RoboBee project, he contributed to an exhibition held in the Boston Science Museum, which attracted over 100,000 visitors annually.

Prof. Chen attended the summer annual meeting held by the World Economic Forum in 2016. Along with his colleague Dr. Elizabeth Farrell Helbing. They brought a swarm of 40 RoboBees to the exhibition and presented the RoboBee project to worldwide leaders from academia, government, business and society.