ShanghAI Lectures: Shuhei Miyashita “Tribolon: Scalable Self-Assembling Robots”

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2010-12-02

Self-assembly is of crucial importance in the biological realm at all scales. This talk introduces a series of self-assembling robots developed in our project, and discusses key features that such robots are expected to possess. The robots give rise to unique insight into the interdependencies between the components’ morphology, systems’ stochasticity, and the emerged behaviors, and cast light on the design principle of self-assembling components. We believe that the research introduced deepens the practical understanding of the formation of spontaneous structure and function, firmly provides knowledge for the realization of scalable self-assembly systems, and will, ultimately brings us closer to answering the nature of “living” systems.

Shuhei Miyashita received his masters degree in computational intelligence and systems science from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, his bachelor degree in electrical and electronics engineering from Jouchi University, and his PhD degree at the AI Lab, University of Zurich in Switzerland. He is a postdoctoral research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. His publications can be found at http://shuhei.net/.

The ShanghAI Lectures are a videoconference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence, run and organized by Rolf Pfeifer (from 2009 till 2012), Fabio Bonsignorio (since 2013), and me with partners around the world. 

The ShanghAI Lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

Nathan Labhart Co-organizing the ShanghAI Lectures since 2009.

Nathan Labhart Co-organizing the ShanghAI Lectures since 2009.