How Math and Engineering Changed This Student’s Life: A Personal Story

When most people think of robots, what comes to mind is probably something with a hard shell, likely made of metal or plastic—and maybe shaped like a human. But when Boston University mechanical engineering major Sarah Alizadeh-Shabdiz thinks of robots, she pictures a bendy, wiggly piece of rubber. Purple rubber. That’s because Alizadeh-Shabdiz (ENG’26) spent her summer doing research in BU’s Soft Robotics Control Lab.

Soft robots are just that: robots—or parts of robots—made from bendable, pliable materials, such as silicone rubber. Designers of soft robots often take inspiration from nature, looking at animals with naturally flexible limbs, like octopuses. The potential applications of their work are wide-ranging, from assisting with surgeries to engaging in search and rescue missions in difficult-to-squeeze-into places. In the Soft Robotics Control Lab, principal investigator Andrew Sabelhaus, a College of Engineering assistant professor of mechanical engineering, and his students are studying novel ways to improve how soft robots are controlled, as well as the fundamental physics underlying how they interact with the environment.

“Soft robots are understood in the scientific community to be inherently safer,” says Alizadeh-Shabdiz. This makes sense, intuitively: a robot arm made of soft rubber seems less likely to crush something than one made of hard plastic or metal. But it turns out that very little research has been done on exactly how much safer soft robots might be. Among Alizadeh-Shabdiz’s summer research projects was an experiment, funded by a grant from the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, designed to measure the force one of the lab’s soft robot limbs can exert on an object.

In the video above, find out why Alizadeh-Shabdiz needed the help of Toys“R”Us to complete her study and how her love of mathematics inspires her research—and her goal of becoming a teacher.

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