Friday, November 15, 2024 - 3:00pm
Event Calendar Category
Uncategorized
Speaker Name
Robert Katzschmann
Affiliation
ETH Zurich
Building and Room number
45-230
Building Life-like Robots: From Musculoskeletal Designs to Biohybrid Innovations
Living robots represent a new frontier in engineering materials for robotic systems, incorporating biological living cells and synthetic materials into their design. These biohybrid 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 dive deeper into our breakthroughs in vision controlled inkjet printing for robotics from our Nature paper last year. We will then touch on xolographic biofabrication techniques, which enabled our biohybrid swimmers shown at RoboSoft. Additionally, we will discuss the computational optimization of musculoskeletal systems through approaches presented in our recent work published at Humanoids. Together, these projects showcase how musculoskeletal, bio-hybrid, and computational techniques are opening new frontiers in robotics interaction and manipulation.
Robert Katzschmann is an Assistant Professor of Robotics at ETH Zurich, where he leads the Soft Robotics Lab, focusing on the design and fabrication of soft, musculoskeletal, and bio-hybrid robots that safely interact with humans and the environment. His work draws inspiration from biological systems, using soft, compliant materials to create lifelike, adaptive robots. Before joining ETH Zurich, Robert served as the Chief Technology Officer at Dexai Robotics, where he led robotic automation projects for commercial kitchens, and as a Senior Applied Scientist at Amazon Robotics. He received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT in 2018, where his research on soft robotics garnered media attention from outlets like The New York Times and BBC. He holds a Diplom-Ingenieur degree from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany. Robert’s contributions to the robotics community include serving as an editor for leading journals and conferences such as IJRR, ICRA, IROS, RoboSoft, npj Robotics, and RSS. His lab is affiliated with the Center for Robotics (RobotX), the ETH AI Center, and the ETH Max Planck Institute Center for Learning Systems, promoting collaboration in advancing robotics technologies.
MIT Robotics Seminars are supported by the following sponsors this semester: Skydio, Project Aria, Symbotic, and Amazon. Skydio (https://www.skydio.com/) is a leader in vision-based autonomous navigation for drones. Symbotic (https://www.symbotic.com/) is redesigning the future of warehouse automation with mobile robots. Meta's Project Aria is innovating on many fronts (https://www.projectaria.com/), from egocentric machine perception to contextual AI and applications. Amazon (https://www.amazon.science/research-areas/robotics) is building new kinds of GenAI for robotics as they grow towards 1M deployed warehouse robots. Thanks to LIDS and CSAIL for thier continued support.