Creating Life-like Robots: From Musculoskeletal Designs to Biohybrid Innovations
Date: January 24, 2025 @ 3:00-4:00PM | Location: Gates B03 | Speaker: Robert Katzschmann | Affiliation: ETH Zurich
Abstract:
Living robots represent a new 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 behaviors, sustainable production, robust performance, and environmental stewardship. Nature’s musculoskeletal design can act as an inspiration for both artificial and living robots. 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 discuss our breakthroughs in vision-controlled inkjet printing for robotics from our Nature paper, as well as xolographic biofabrication techniques for biohybrid swimmers presented at RoboSoft. Additionally, I’ll share insights from our computational optimization of musculoskeletal systems featured at Humanoids. Together, these projects showcase how musculoskeletal, bio-hybrid, and computational techniques are opening new frontiers in robotics interaction and manipulation.
Bio:
Robert Katzschmann is an Assistant Professor of Robotics at ETH Zurich and the founder of the Soft Robotics Lab, where he develops new robotic morphologies for a future of life-like robots that seamlessly integrate with us. Robert is also the cofounder and scientific advisor of mimic robotics, which develops autonomous dexterous manipulation solutions. He holds a Diplom-Ingenieur from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), wrote his master thesis at Stanford University (2013), and earned his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) in 2018.