MEAM Seminar: “Bioinspired Robotic Sensorimotor Systems via 3D Printed Soft and Architected Materials”
March 18 at 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM
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.
Ryan Truby
June and Donald Brewer Junior Professor and Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Northwestern University
Ryan Truby is the June and Donald Brewer Junior Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University. His research broadly aims to advance machine intelligence by material design. He and his team in the Robotic Matter Lab are currently developing novel soft actuators and sensors, rapid multimaterial 3D printing methods, and machine learning-based control strategies for soft sensorized robots. Ryan’s research also includes work in 3D printing vascularized tissue constructs, soft electronics, artificial muscles, and architected materials. Prior to Northwestern, Ryan was a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, and he received his Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Harvard University. Ryan is the recipient of a DARPA Young Faculty Award, Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Award, the Outstanding Paper Award at the 2019 IEEE International Conference on Soft Robotics, an Inaugural 2018 Schmidt Science Fellowship, and the Gold Award for Graduate Students from the Materials Research Society.