Heng-Sheng Chang

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About

Heng-Sheng Chang is a leading researcher at the intersection of soft robotics, continuum mechanics, and bio-inspired control. His work centers on the modeling, estimation, and control of highly deformable, slender structures—a critical challenge for next-generation robotic systems that must operate safely in complex environments. Chang’s most influential contribution is the development of energy shaping control for a "CyberOctopus" soft arm, a breakthrough that applies rigorous passivity-based methods to Cosserat rod models. This work, with 36 citations, demonstrates how mechanical intelligence can simplify control by leveraging the natural elasticity of soft materials. More recently, he pioneered a physics-informed, vision-based method that reconstructs all six modes of deformation in slender bodies from camera data—a vital tool for biologists studying animal locomotion and engineers designing soft robots. This approach, already cited 9 times, bridges the gap between high-fidelity physics models and practical sensing. By unifying theory with experiment, Chang is laying the mathematical and computational foundations for a new generation of embodied, compliant machines that move and interact with the world as gracefully as their biological counterparts.