People

Prof. Wei-Hsi Chen directs the FORGE Lab, where he studies how a robot’s physical form gives rise to its capabilities. His research aims to establish computational principles for robot morphology: how geometry, mechanisms, materials, and control can be designed together from the requirements of a task.

Rather than treating robot bodies as fixed hardware, his group asks how they can become part of the algorithmic design process itself. FORGE combines robotics, mechanics, computational design, and physical experimentation to uncover these relationships, with the long-term goal of enabling robots to be computationally generated from task specifications.

Before joining NC State he was a postdoctoral associate at Penn. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Systems Engineering and his M.S. in Robotics from the University of Pennsylvania, and his B.S. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from National Taiwan University.