*CANCELLED* May Luncheon with The Affiliates and the Westwood Women's Bruin Club

Join The Town & Gown Affiliates and the Westwood Women's Bruin Club for our May Luncheon! This month's guest speaker is UCLA Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Professor, Dr. Dennis Hong.

Dr. Dennis Hong is a Professor and the Founding Director of RoMeLa (Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory) in the Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Department at UCLA. He has been working on a variety of innovative robots and mechanisms and recently unveiled ARTEMIS, a first-of-its-kind electrically driven dynamic humanoid robot.

In Hollywood, robots are often depicted in humanoid form. Thus, when we think of robots, we naturally imagine humanoid robots: ones that can move around in a human environment and work using tools made for humans. RoMeLa has been developing humanoid robots for more than a decade for firefighting and disaster relief applications. However, such robots are still too slow, too unstable, too complex, too expensive, and too unsafe, which prevent them from being used in real-life situations. Do robots really need to look like humans? At our May Luncheon, Dr. Hong will revisit this question, present some of the new exciting morphologies as solutions, discuss the creative process, and help us imagine our future with robots.