Title: Human-scale Soft Robotics

Abstract: One of the important areas of soft robotics is soft robots that can physically interact with humans, human-scale environments, and objects typically found in a home. Such robots can play important roles as caregiver, domestic, and entertainment robots. Disney’s movie Big Hero 6 publicized a soft (inflatable) human-scale caregiving robot, Baymax, which has sparked an interest in robotics in many young people. This talk will describe how this movie was influenced by academic robotics research, and in turn put forward several inspirational technological visions for how such a robot might work, which robotics researchers are now following up on, including soft/rigid hybrid robots, and superhuman sensing that goes beyond the human model of eyes and ears mounted on a head, proprioceptive (joint) sensors, and tactile sensing in the skin to include eyes and ears all over the body, tactile sensing at a distance, radar, and ultrasound.

Bio: Chris Atkeson is a Professor in the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute. He works on robot learning, humanoid robotics, and human-scale soft robotics. Work from his group inspired the human-scale soft robot Baymax in Disney’s movie Big Hero 6. He has worked at MIT, Georgia Tech, and finally CMU since 1981. He hopes that by the time he needs care in his old age, there will be a robot ready to care for him.

Title: Biology as Prototype

Abstract: Two outstanding characteristics of biological objects is that they rely on structure for their performance and are composed of semi-autonomous units (cells, tissues, organs …). They tend to match their compliance with their surroundings. Structure requires morphogenesis, which requires deployment. Arthropods re-deploy their structure at each moult. These statements will be justified and their implications explored and illustrated.

Bio: Julian Vincent spent most of his research career studying the mechanical design of organisms. In Reading University he initiated and ran the Centre for Biomimetics together with Professor G Jeronimidis. He was invited to the University of Bath where he initiated the Centre for Biomimetic and Natural Technologies. His interests have covered the mechanical design of plants and animals, texture of food, use of natural materials in technology, deployable structures in architecture and robotics, smart systems and structures.  He has recently been developing methods to introduce concepts from biology into engineering and design, based on the unifying concept of the trade-off and has attracted critical acceptance.

Title: Overcoming the Adhesion Paradox and Switchability Conflict on Rough Surfaces with Shape Memory Polymers

Abstract: Maintaining adhesion on rough surfaces is a long-standing challenge in engineering due to the adhesion paradox (rapid decrease in adhesion strength with increasing surface roughness) and the switchability conflict (trade-off between strong adhesion strength and easy detachment). This challenge is important for robotics applications. Here, we show [1] that, utilizing the rubber-glass transition of shape memory polymers (SMPs), both challenges are overcome. Making contact between an SMP adhesive and a rough surface in the rubbery state followed by shape-locking in the glassy state results in orders of magnitude enhancement in adhesion strength. On the other hand, detaching the SMP adhesive upon transitioning back to rubbery-state results in weak adhesion and on-demand detachment. We further demonstrate that, employing our method, rougher surfaces enable stronger adhesion and easier detachment.

Reference: [1] Changhong Linghu, Yangchengyi Liu, Tan Yee Yuan, Sing Jun Heng Marcus, Yuxuan Tang, Aiwu Zhou, Xiufeng Wang, Dong Li, Huajian Gao, K. Jimmy Hsia, PNAS, accepted for publication.

Bio: Huajian Gao received his B.S. degree from Xian Jiaotong University in 1982, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Engineering Science from Harvard in 1984 and 1988, respectively. He served on the faculty of Stanford from 1988-2002, as Director at the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research from 2001-2006 and as Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Engineering at Brown from 2006-2019. At present, he is one of 6 Distinguished University Professors at Nanyang Technological University and Scientific Director of the Institute of High Performance Computing in Singapore. Professor Gao’s research has been focused on the understanding of basic principles that control mechanical properties and behaviors of materials in both engineering and biological systems. He is Editor-in-Chief of Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids, the flagship journal in his field. His list of honors includes elections to US National Academy of Sciences, US National Academy of Engineering, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, German National Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Academia Europaea, as well as numerous academic awards including the Timoshenko Medal and Rodney Hill Prize, the two highest lifetime achievement awards in his field.

Title: The Multiscale Competency of Biology: Cancer, Cellular Collective Intelligence, and Biorobotics

Abstract: Each of us was once a single cell. The journey from an unfertilized oocyte to a complex human with metacognition is slow and gradual, standing ready to teach us fundamental lessons about the scaling of cognition, collective intelligence, and embodied emergent minds. In this talk, I will describe our work on understanding the diverse competencies of cells and tissues in various problem spaces, and the role of bioelectric networks in the evolution of increasingly complex minds. I will also show our novel synthetic organisms called Xenobots. Together, these findings have implications ranging across regenerative medicine, biological robotics, and philosophy of mind.

Bio: Dr. Michael Levin studies diverse intelligence in a wide range of evolved, designed, and hybrid systems. He received dual BS degrees in computer science and biology at Tufts University, and then a PhD in genetics from Harvard. He is the founding director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts and co-director of the Institute for Computer Designed Robotics. His group works at the intersection of developmental biophysics, cognitive science, and computer science. They use a variety of models, including slime molds, cells, cultured organs, frog embryos, regenerating flatworms, and in silico simulations to understand how the basal intelligence of molecular networks and cells scales up.  They develop computational tools to understand how systems at all scales navigate physiological, transcriptional, morphogenetic, and behavioral problem spaces. One of the main directions of the lab concerns developmental bioelectricity as the medium of the collective intelligence of cells during regulative morphogenesis. The goal is to abstract control principles of the scaling of cognition to improve synthetic biorobotics, regenerative medicine, and the understanding of embodied minds.

Title: Making Wearable Materials Smarter

Abstract: Clothes are getting smarter — Advances in materials science, manufacturing and computer science are enabling a wearable revolution.  For example, it is possible to design new materials that change stiffness on command, monitor metabolic activity and can be used to communicate through the sense of touch. These new materials will allow garments and fashion to bring ever closer together the physical and digital worlds. In this lecture, I will show examples of how we approach the design and fabrication of new materials for healthcare, defense and haptic interactions, borrowing ideas from soft robotics applications.

Bio: Chiara Daraio is the G. Bradford Jones Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Physics at Caltech. Her work is focused on developing new materials with advanced mechanical and sensing properties, for application in robotics, medical devices, and vibration absorption. She received her undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Universita’ Politecnica delle Marche, Italy (2001) and her M.S. (2003) and Ph.D. degrees (2006) in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of California, San Diego. She joined Caltech in fall of 2006 and was promoted full professor in 2010. From 2013 to 2016, she served as a Professor of Mechanics and Materials at ETH Zürich. She received a Presidential Early Career Award (PECASE) from President Obama, a US Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award and a National Science Foundation CAREER award. She was elected as a Sloan Research Fellow and selected by Popular Science magazine among the “Brilliant 10.” She served as a Board Editor for Science Magazine (AAAS) and is an Associate Editor for the journals Matter (Cell Press), Multifunctional Materials (IOP), the Journal of Strain Analysis for Engineering Design (Sage Publishing), and Frontiers in Mechanics (Frontiers). For a complete list of her publication and research information see www.daraio.catech.edu.