MEAM Seminar: “Bioinspired Robotic Sensorimotor Systems via 3D Printed Soft and Architected Materials”
March 18, 2025 at 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM
Organizer
Venue
Animals can easily adapt their bodies and movements to new, unstructured environments and situations. Robots cannot. While engineers construct robots from rigid, motorized mechanisms to precisely control their movements, vertebrates leverage compliant, deformable musculoskeletal systems to adaptively navigate complex environments and produce dynamically stable gaits and motions. Providing robots with an equivalent musculoskeletal system will open new opportunities for achieving bioinspired motility, adaptability, robustness, and performance. However, this vision is stymied not only by limitations in current materials and manufacturing methods, but also in how to strategically integrate soft and rigid materials in robot bodies. With these challenges in mind, I will present approaches for engineering artificial musculoskeletal systems via 3D printed soft and architected materials. First, I will introduce a flexible, architected soft actuator unit for motorized extensional motion. I will introduce techniques for sensorizing these architected actuators, assembling them for locomoting soft robots, and interfacing them with skeletal elements for force transmission. Finally, I will discuss new strategies for architecting soft ionic conductors for distributed sensing. These efforts aim to embody both physical and computational intelligence into real-world-deployable soft robots with practical task capabilities.

