Kefei Wen of University of British Columbia, Vancouver

Robots that physically interact with humans are making their way into many applications like in

manufacturing and healthcare. Many parallel robots are favourable candidates that can be used

as physical human-robot interaction interfaces since the actuators are mounted on or close to

the base, thereby reducing the inertia of the moving parts and ensuring backdrivability.

However, the performance of such robots is limited by their relatively small rotational

capabilities due to singularities within the workspace. In this talk, we present the kinematic

analysis and motion control of a class of novel kinematically redundant hybrid parallel robots,

where kinematic redundancy is utilised to completely alleviate singularities, resulting in a very

large orientational workspace. Potential applications of this kind of robots in the context of

physical human-robot interaction are then demonstrated through a prototype.

Biography:

Dr. Kefei Wen is an Assistant Professor with the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the

University of British Columbia. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering

from Yeungnam University, Korea, in 2012 and 2015, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in

Mechanical Engineering from Université Laval, Canada, in 2020. During his Ph.D. studies, he

developed a methodology for synthesizing novel kinematically redundant parallel manipulators

which are well-suited for physical human-robot interaction. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the

Continuum Robotics Laboratory at the University of Toronto Mississauga from 2021 to 2022,

where he proposed a scheme to unify the modelling approaches of both rigid parallel robots

and tendon-driven parallel continuum robots. His research interests include kinematics,

dynamics, and control of complex robotic systems. Dr. Wen received the ASME JMR 2020

Reviewers of the Year Award and one of his co-authored papers was selected for Honorable

Mention at IEEE T-RO 2021.

Email:

Address: Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of British Columbia , Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada