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 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.

Bio:

Robert Katzschmann is an Assistant Professor of Robotics at ETH Zurich, where he leads the Soft Robotics Lab. He is associated with the Center for Robotics (RobotX), the ETH AI Center, and the Center for Learning Systems, a collaboration between ETH and the Max Planck Institute (MPI). His research primarily focuses on developing musculoskeletal robots that effectively combine soft, rigid, and living materials to perform complex tasks in real-world scenarios. Before he started his tenure at ETH Zurich, he served as the CTO of Dexai Robotics and as a Senior Applied Scientist at Amazon Robotics in the USA. He earned his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2018 and his Diplom from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, in 2013. His work has been published in leading journals and conferences such as Nature, Nature Communications, Science Advances, and Science Robotics, as well as at prominent robotics conferences including ICRA, IROS, CoRL, ICLR, ICML, and RoboSoft. In addition to his research, he contributes as an editor for the International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR) and has organized several workshops for the RoboSoft conference. He also works as an associate editor for ICRA, IROS, RoboSoft, and RSS, and he is an editorial board. member of npj Robotics. His research has been featured in premier news outlets such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and BBC.