Plenary Talks
Katia Bertoldi
Katia Bertoldi is the William and Ami Kuan Danoff Professor of Applied Mechanics at the Harvard John A.Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. She is the recipient of the NSF Career Award 2011 and of the ASME’s 2014 Hughes Young Investigator Award. She published over 150 peer-reviewed papers and several patents. Dr Bertoldi’s research contributes to the design of materials with a carefully designed meso-structure that leads to novel effective behavior at the macroscale. She investigates both mechanical and acoustic properties of such structured materials, with a particular focus on harnessing instabilities and strong geometric non-linearities to generate new modes of functionality.
HARNESSING INSTABILITIES TO DESIGN SOFT ROBOTS
From minimally invasive surgical tools and assistive devices to compliant grippers and video game addons, inflatable soft robots have claimed an entire domain of applications for which safe interactions with the surrounding environment is the priority. They are inherently compliant, easy to fabricate, and able to achieve complex motions harnessing the input pressure. This simplicity, however, brings strict limitations: soft actuators are often restricted to unimodal and slow deformation. Here, we embrace instabilities as a paradigm to improve the functionality of inflatable soft robots. First, we show that buckling-induced directional frictional properties of kirigami surfaces enable a simple extending soft actuator to efficiently crawl. Then, we demonstrate that shell snapping can be exploited to make soft actuators jump even when inflated at a slow rate. Finally, we embrace multistability to to
realize inflatable cylindrical structures capable of supporting multiple deformation modes, while being globally actuated using a single pressure input. Together, these examples highlight the potential of
instabilities in enabling the design and fabrication of soft robotic systems with enhanced functionality.
Josh Bongard
Josh Bongard is the Veinott Professor of Computer Science at the University of Vermont and director of the Morphology, Evolution & Cognition Laboratory. His work involves automated design and manufacture of soft-, evolved-, and crowdsourced robots, as well as computer-designed organisms: the so-called “xenobots”. A PECASE, TR35, and Cozzarelli Prize recipient, he has received funding from NSF, NASA, DARPA, ARO and the Sloan Foundation. He is the co-author of the book How The Body Shapes the Way We Think, the instructor of a reddit-based evolutionary robotics MOOC, and director of the robotics outreach program Twitch Plays Robotics.
FROM RIGID TO SOFT TO BIOLOGICAL ROBOTS
Organisms and robots must find ways to return to a viable state when confronted with unexpected internal surprise such as injury, or external surprise, such as a new environment. Rigid robots can only confront such challenges by adapting behaviorally. Soft robots have the added option of morphological adaptation: changing shape, material properties, topology, plurality, and/or mass. Finally, biological robots — machines built completely from biological tissues — inherit the protean nature of their donor organisms, providing them with forms of morphological and behavioral adaptation beyond even today’s most morphologically plastic soft robots. In this talk I will review our recent efforts to create biological robots, and how their protean natures have led us to rethink how we approach soft robotics, embodied cognition, and intelligence in general.
Telmo Pievani
Telmo Pievani is Full Professor at the Department of Biology, University of Padua, where he covers the first Italian chair of Philosophy of Biological Sciences. Past President (2017-2019) of the Italian Society of Evolutionary Biology, he is Fellow of several academic Institutions and scientific societies. He is author of 276 publications, included several books. Fellow of the Scientific Board of science festivals in Italy, since 2014 he is fellow of the International Scientific Council of MUSE in Trento. He is Director of “Pikaia”, the Italian website dedicated to evolution. He is Director of the University of Padua web magazine, Il Bo LIVE. With Niles Eldredge, Ian Tattersall and Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, he was the Curator of International science exhibitions. Author of books for children and theatre scientific shows, he is a columnist for Il Corriere della Sera, and the magazines Le Scienze and Micromega.
INSPIRED BY EVOLUTION: INSIGHTS FOR SOFT ROBOTICS EVOLVABILITY
Adaptation to ever-changing and unpredictable ecological niches, morphological tinkering and functional co-optations in new contexts (exaptation), redundancy as a source of innovation, functional and energy efficiency: evolution can offer many original ideas to think about the future developments of Soft Robotics, mostly in terms of innovation and environmental sustainability.
Rob Shepherd
Rob Shepherd is an associate professor at Cornell University in the Sibley School of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering. At Cornell, he runs the Organic Robotics Lab, which focuses on using methods of invention, including bioinspired design approaches, in combination with material science to improve machine function and autonomy. We rely on new and old synthetic approaches for soft material composites that create new design opportunities in the field of robotics. He is the recipient of an Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Award, an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award. He is an advisor to the American Bionics Project which aims to make wheelchairs obsolete. He is also the co-founder of the Organic Robotics Corporation, which aims to digitally record the tactile interactions of humans and machines with their environment.
EMBRACING COMPLEXITY FOR ENDURING AND ADAPTIVE, ORGANIC ROBOTS VIA AUTONOMOUS MATERIALS
Animals are semi-discretized. Systems of organs that perform multiple functions and are spatially discrete from each other, yet interconnected chemically and electrically. The complexity of animals such as vertebrate mammals allow for adaptation within a single generation that has allowed many examples of species that have thrived without genetic modification even during periods of significant environmental change. In the search for generally adaptive robots, useful for far field exploration missions, we believe that a similar model of complex, multifunctional, and interconnected organ systems of animals should be embraced, rather than avoided. Of course, it is not yet that simple to be complex, but we will present approaches we have used to distribute sensing, actuation, energy, and computation in soft robots. The framework we use for guiding our design evolution is Autonomous Materials, where we push the manufacturing of robots towards forming processes, and multifunctional use of material chemistry. The resulting machinery presented will be organic both in chemical makeup and subsystem analogy to organisms.
Thomas Speck
Thomas Speck is full professor for ‘Botany: Functional Morphology and Biomimetics’ and Director of the Botanic Garden, University of Freiburg. He is spokesperson of the Cluster of Excellence “Living, Adaptive, and Energy-autonomous Materials Systems (livMatS @ FIT)”, deputy managing director of the “Freiburg Center for Interactive Materials and Bio-Inspired Technologies (FIT)”, and scientific member of the Materials Research Centre Freiburg (FMF). Thomas Speck is also spokesperson of the Competence Network Biomimetics and vice-chair of the Society for Technical Biology and Bionics. He received several scientific awards, is (co-)editor of several scientific books and journals and has published more than 300 scientific articles in peer reviewed journals & books.
PLANT MOVEMENTS AS MODELS FOR SOFT ROBOTICS AND SOFT MACHINES IN TECHNOLOGY, ARCHITECTURE AND MEDICINE
Today, biomimetics attracts increasing attention as well from basic and applied research as from various fields of industry and building construction. Biomimetics has a high innovation potential and offers possibilities for the development of sustainable technical products and production chains. Novel sophisticated methods for analysing and simulating the form-structure-function-relation on various hierarchical levels allow new fascination insights in multi-scale mechanics and other functions of biological materials syste,s. Additionally, new production methods enable for the first time the transfer of many outstanding properties of the biological models into innovative biomimetic products at reasonable costs.
In recent decades, plants have been recognized as valuable concept generators for biomimetic research in many field of application in technology in general, and architecture and medicine in particular. Plant-inspired developments in the fields of soft machines and soft robotics are demonstrated by research projects currently carried out in the Plant Biomechanics Group Freiburg and the Cluster of Excellence livMatS. Examples include liana-inspired soft robots, leaf- and flower-inspired façade shading systems, demonstrators for pine cone-inspired self-adaptive building hulls and artificial Venus flytraps. As example for a medical application a prototype for an adaptive wrist-forearm splint developed in collaboration with the ICD at the University of Stuttgart is presented. A particular focus of current research is on embodied energy and intelligence found in moving plant organs, which offer a huge potential for a new generation of materials systems for soft robots, bioinspired architecture and technical applications in general.
Barbara Webb
Barbara Webb completed a BSc in Psychology at the University of Sydney then a PhD in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh. Her PhD research on building a robot model of cricket sound localization was featured in Scientific American and established her as a pioneer in the field of biorobotics – using embodied models to evaluation biological hypotheses of behavioural control. She has held lectureships at the University of Nottingham and University of Stirling before returning to a faculty position in the School of Informatics at Edinburgh in 2003. She was appointed to a personal chair as Professor of Biorobotics in 2010, and awarded an EPSRC Established Career Fellowship in 2021.
BODIES AND BRAINS: INSIGHTS FROM INSECT-INSPIRED ROBOTICS
One motivation for investigating alternative approaches to robot actuation, such as soft mechanisms, is the observation that many biological systems acheive task success as much through their body design as through their brains. We have investigated a range of insect behaviours from this point of view, from simple steering through to complex navigation. This talk will reflect on some of the general insights gained, particularly into the need to combine multiple methodological approaches to understand biological function.