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BYU grad students design and build productive, safe robots

By Jacob Nielson - | Jan 25, 2025

Jaren Wilkey, BYU Photo

Baloo, a robot built by Brigham Young University graduate researcher Curtis Johnson, picks up a box.

As robots become increasingly common in society, Brigham Young University engineering students are designing them to be more impactful in the world around them.

Two graduate students spearheaded projects of creating “soft robots” capable of doing productive tasks but also designed to be safe while working in close proximity to humans.

Unlike traditional robots powered by motors and gearing that would either break apart or hurt a human in a collision, these soft robots are powered by filling pressure valves and chambers, and they deform if a human runs into them.

“Both soft robots are powered by air pressure,” said graduate researcher Dallin Cordon. “If we want humans and robots to work together, we want that to be safe.”

Baloo, a personified robot with a head, eyes and two arms, was built by graduate researcher Curtis Johnson, under the tutelage of mechanical engineering professor Marc Killpack, and is designed to use its entire body to complete tasks.

“Every robot I know of that’s either commercially available or still researching, they’re interacting with the world with their hands,” Johnson said. “And this is a paradigm shift of looking at how we can use the whole structure of the robot. I think that’s the biggest unique part.”

Cordon created another robot, under the direction of Killpack and mechanical engineering professor John Salmon, that sits on four wheels with one giant arm stretching out and is capable of co-manipulation, or working with humans to perform tasks.

“We’re doing collaborative manipulation with a human,” Cordon said. “So anywhere where you can imagine a situation of a human working with another human to perform a task with an object between them.”

These specific robots, Cordon emphasized, were built for research purposes and aren’t being shipped off to a factory line anytime soon. But the idea is to show that robots can make a legitimate impact.

A robot like Baloo, Johnson envisions, could use its torso to move a couch, or bend over and do laundry. Or, it could aid in construction or disaster response.

Cordon’s robot would be capable of teaming up with a human to lift a couch, or even a wounded person on a stretcher.

“The idea being that if we can learn about that capability and teach robots to do that, that the robots themselves can be a lot more capable to help us in situations where we need help,” Johnson said.

“We have this vision for soft robotics to one day be mass producible and do all these types of tasks, but we first need to be able to figure out how to even do that,” Cordon added. “And so with the robots that we’re developing, their goal is, as a research tool, to be able to figure out the problems associated with that.”

This project, which Johnson said he worked on for three years, was made possible by a grant from the National Science Foundation. Through the process, the graduate students have collaborated with researchers from different institutions, as well as undergrad students at BYU, and are committed to sharing their research with others.

“(Dallin’s team) has a few publications. We just submitted one,” Johnson said. “Also, (we have) open source code for people to use, if people are trying to work on these types of problems in different labs and things like that. Our publications are there to look at, as well as our code. Very open source kind of culture.”