Biography

Sonia is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Wesleyan University working on soft, knitted sensors and actuators for soft robot skins. In 2023, she completed a postdoc with Prof. Kris Dorsey at Northeastern as part of the Institute for Experiential Robotics, where she worked on soft origami sensors. She received her PhD in Electrical and Systems Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 2021, where she worked with Prof. Dan Koditschek in the GRASP Lab to develop a reactive controller to reduce the energetic cost of transport for legged robots on sand. Prior to coming to Penn, Sonia worked at Janelia Farm Research Campus on a team building a rough behavioral map of the fruit fly brain. Sonia’s undergraduate degree is from Vassar College, where she studied Cognitive Science and worked with Prof. John Long to use biologically inspired robots to test hypotheses about the evolution of early vertebrates during the Cambrian Explosion.

Research

Sonia’s research focuses on the morphological design and control of robots, asking questions like how detailed a model of the environment a robot needs, why a robot might need legs or wheels for different tasks, and what the trade-off is between robustness and plasticity when implementing aspects of a robot's control using morphology versus actuated degrees of freedom.

Sonia is currently developing a research program to address these questions using soft, knitted robots. As an automated 3D manufacturing method, knitting provides an opportunity to develop robots with arbitrary morphologies. At present, Sonia is building knitted sensor modules which can be incorporated into a robot body.

Plain-language descriptions of some of Sonia’s research projects are available on the Projects page. A complete list of Sonia’s publications may be found on her Google Scholar profile.