TC on Soft Robotics Debate

Join the RAS Technical Committee on Soft Robotics in upcoming debates and participate with different controversial topics in Soft Robotics, such as future and potential impact, real-world deployment, morphological computation vs. traditional control methods, etc., are frequent subject of debates. General community can benefit from making these debates more formal and publicly available. Debates are 80 minutes long with 4-6 participants and a moderator from recognized experts in the field.

Upcoming Event: 

”Bioinspired vs. Biohybrid Design”

Save the date: Monday, 15 Feb 2021, 10:00 am -12:00 pm EST (3:00 pm -5:00 pm GMT)

Participation link: https://ieee.webex.com/ieee/onstage/g.php?MTID=e9307012038f351b7f4c66f01190496cd

Please submit questions to spark discussion or get answers from our experts!

Bioinspiration, the development of novel materials and structures inspired by biological systems and evolution, has been the essence and main claim of Soft Robotics research. Yet, soft robots are nowhere close to mimicking the life cycle of biological creatures, i.e. growth, adaptation, morphogenesis, and returning to their starting state. Going beyond smart materials, biohybrids may be the solution to multifunctionality and biocompatibility. In this debate, we will bring together experts in Bioinspiration and Biohybrid design to discuss the necessary steps to make more competent soft robots. We will try to answer whether bioinspired research should focus more on developing new bioinspired material and structures or on the integration of living and artificial structures in biohybrid designs.

Panellists:

Prof. Cecilia Laschi		Cecilia Laschi is Professor at the National University of Singapore. Her research interests are in biorobotics and especially in soft robotics, that she pioneered and contributed to develop at international level. She received a Ph.D. in Robotics. She was JSPS visiting researcher at Waseda University in Tokyo. She has been Professor at the BioRobotics Institute of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa, Italy, currently on leave. She is Senior member of IEEE, RAS AdCom member, co-chair of the TC on Soft Robotics and founder of the RoboSoft conference.
Prof. Metin Sitti		Prof. Metin Sitti is the director of the Physical Intelligence Department at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, Germany since 2014. As his current ancillary academic positions, he is a professor at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, professor in Koç University, Turkey, and honorary professor in University of Stuttgart, Germany. He has pioneered many research areas, including wireless miniature medical soft robots, gecko-inspired microfiber adhesives, bio-inspired miniature robots, and physical intelligence. He is the editor-in-chief of both Progress in Biomedical Engineering and Journal of Micro-Bio Robotics journals, and an associate editor for both Science Advances and Extreme Mechanics Letters journals. He is an IEEE Fellow.
Dr. Ritu Raman		Ritu Raman, Ph.D., is an engineer with a passion for biohybrid design: building machines powered by biological materials that work with the human body to fight disease and damage. She has led several initiatives to introduce the next generation to this emerging discipline, including authoring a general audience book titled Biofabrication (MIT Press, Fall 2021). Ritu is currently a postdoctoral fellow advised by Prof. Robert Langer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, funded by a L’Oréal USA Women in Science Fellowship and NASEM Ford Foundation Fellowship. She received her B.S. magna cum laude from Cornell University and her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an NSF Fellow. She holds many awards for scientific innovation, including being named a Kavli Fellow by the National Academy of Science and being named to the MIT Technology Review 35 Innovators Under 35 and Forbes 30 Under 30: Science lists. Ritu grew up in India, Kenya, and the United States where she learned to appreciate and thrive in diverse and dynamic environments. She is passionate about increasing diversity in STEM and has championed many initiatives to empower women in science, including being named a AAAS IF/THEN ambassador and founding the Women in Innovation and STEM Database at MIT (WISDM). Website: RituRaman.com | Twitter: @DrRituRaman | Instagram: @ritu.raman.
Dr. Talia Moore		Dr. Talia Moore is currently an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan. Her research interests are Dynamics of terrestrial locomotion, arrhythmic and transient locomotion, bio-inspired design, soft robotics, animal-robot interaction.  She uses laboratory-based biomechanical experiments to establish mechanisms for how biological structure determines the motion capabilities of animals, which she combines with phylogenetic comparative methods to model changes in morphology and locomotion over evolutionary time. She develops techniques to record animal motion in the field, tools to quantitatively characterize this motion, and bio-inspired robotic systems to test hypotheses regarding the evolution, ecology, and control of arrhythmic motion.
Dr. Sam Kriegman		Dr. Sam Kriegman is a Postdoctoral Associate at the University of Vermont. His research focuses on the AI-driven automated design of robots and biological machines. This involves the dynamical simulation of soft body systems, simulation-to-reality transfer of physical artifacts, and designing the form of functional systems that have limited neural control or none at all. This research serves an external social need: the creation of autonomous adaptive machines that can safely perform useful work. However, these auto-design tools, and the devices they produce in pursuit of social utility, can also be used as scientific instruments to expose the difficult-to-interrogate mechanisms supportive of complex living systems.

Organizers:
Dr. Marwa Eldewiry, Dr. S.M.Hadi Sadati, Dr. Laura Blumenschein, Dr. Fumiya Iida
On behalf of IEEE RAS Soft Robotics TC