This is a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and virtual attendance on Zoom. This week’s speaker will be virtual.

ABSTRACT

Morphological Computation is a concept in robotics that suggests that the morphology of a robot should play  a crucial role in the design of intelligent machines.  This is inspired by observations in nature, where we can see that biological systems rely heavily on their morphological features to implement useful functionalities to make them more energy efficient, robust and resilient.  We work together with biologists and chemists to extract the underlying principles and to translate them into intelligent morphological structures that can be exploited to facilitate control, improve sensing and accelerate learning.  I will present examples of morphological computation from our group ranging from theoretical models, to simulations, to real robot prototypes.  This will include demonstrations of how we can compute with an octopus inspired robot arm, how we can understand spider webs as mechanical signal processing devices, and how we can grow robot bodies to help us to learn faster.