Kentaro Barhydt

Kentaro Barhydt is a graduate student in mechanical engineering whose research focuses on novel robot design for handling historically challenging objects. Specifically, Kentaro develops robotic mechanisms and design paradigms for safe and effective handling of heavy, fragile, and varied payloads such as the human body and heavy industry equipment. His research introduces “loop closure grasping,” a method of grasping that transforms soft robotic mechanisms from open loops to closed loops, bypassing tradeoffs of single-morphology designs to enable simultaneously strong, gentle, and versatile grasps. Kentaro utilizes MATLAB across the full arc of his work to model, design, analyze, and control robotic systems. As a MathWorks Fellow, he will advance the loop closure grasping approach by developing modeling strategies and building MATLAB tools for automatic grasp creation with inflated beam robots. His research holds the promise to expand the role of robotics and soft mechanisms for challenging yet important applications such as assistive care, industrial automation, and emergency response.