Fall 2024 GRASP on Robotics: Robert Katzschmann, ETH Zürich, “Building Life-like Robots: From Musculoskeletal Designs to Biohybrid Innovations”

This will be a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Wu and Chen and virtual attendance on Zoom.

ABSTRACT

Nature’s musculoskeletal design can inspire both artificial and living robots to create systems that can better interact within our unstructured world. There is value in rethinking how we design and control robots by replacing traditional designs centred around electromagnetic motors and gearboxes with a bio-inspired approach that uses contractive muscles, ligaments, tendons, and skeletons. Taking it even a step further, living robots represent the next frontier in engineering materials for robotic systems, incorporating biological living cells and synthetic materials into their design. These bio-hybrid robots are dynamic and intelligent, potentially harnessing living matter’s capabilities, such as growth, regeneration, morphing, biodegradation, and environmental adaptation. Such attributes position bio-hybrid devices as a transformative force in robotics development, promising enhanced dexterity, adaptive behaviours, sustainable production, robust performance, and environmental stewardship. In this talk, we will explore recent advances in artificial electrohydraulic musculoskeletal robots, which employ electrohydraulic actuators to produce lifelike muscle contractions and adaptive motions, as demonstrated in our recent work published in Nature Communications. We will also dive deeper into our breakthroughs in vision-controlled inkjet printing for robotics from our Nature and xolographic biofabrication techniques, which enabled our biohybrid swimmers presented at RoboSoft. Additionally, we will discuss the computational optimisation of musculoskeletal robotic hands from our recent work presented at Humanoids. The talk will showcase how musculoskeletal, bio-hybrid, and computational techniques open new frontiers in robotics interaction and manipulation.