Connor McCann ’14

Connor McCann is a Ph.D. candidate in mechanical engineering at Harvard University where he studies robotics. He has also previously received an M.S. from Harvard University and a B.S. from Yale University, both in mechanical engineering. In his current research, he is working to develop wearable “soft robots”—i.e., robots constructed from flexible materials such as rubber and fabric—designed to assist the wearer’s shoulder for medical and industrial applications. He is particularly interested in understanding the underlying mechanics that govern the complex physical interactions between these deformable robots and the human body, and has created new experimental, analytical, and numerical tools to study their behavior. Previously, while at Yale, he also conducted research into novel mechanisms for robotic hands. While traditional robotic hands require complicated sensing and control to manipulate objects, the design of these new mechanisms allowed for delicate manipulation without any closed-loop feedback or prior knowledge of the object’s geometry.