Source: Wyss Institute at Harvard University

In the Disruptive Podcast series, Terrence McNally speaks directly with Wyss Institute researchers, exploring what motivates them and how they envision our future as might be impacted by their disruptive technologies. In part 2 of the Disruptive: Bioinspired Robotics episode, Wyss Founding Core Faculty Member Robert Wood discusses new manufacturing techniques that are enabling popup and soft robots.

Wood is developing biologically inspired aerial and terrestrial microrobots, soft-bodied robots, and “printable” robots. His current research interests include new micro- and meso-scale manufacturing techniques, fluid mechanics of low Reynolds number flapping wings, control of sensor-limited and computation-limited systems, active soft materials, and morphable soft-bodied robots. He leads a team of over 40 researchers on the National Science Foundation (NSF) “RoboBees” project to develop coordinated colonies of autonomous robotic bees.

His group is also building agile ambulatory robots that are inspired by insects and centipedes. The long-term goal is to create a swarm of robotic insects capable of performing important tasks, such as search and rescue, hazardous environmental explorations, and pollination. Wood is collaborating with a diverse set of researchers at the Wyss who are exploring soft-bodied autonomous robots and soft devices for human-robot interaction and rehabilitation. One of these projects, called “Second Skin,” is a system in which sensing, actuation, and control mechanisms are embedded in soft devices that can be worn by patients with neuromuscular disorders to help them regain function. Wood is also working on novel manufacturing processes for “printable robots” with the goal of automating robot development and creating new methods for rapid prototyping complex electromechanical devices.

Source: Wyss Institute at Harvard University

In the Disruptive Podcast series, Terrence McNally speaks directly with Wyss Institute researchers, exploring what motivates them and how they envision our future as might be impacted by their disruptive technologies. In part 1 of the Disruptive: Bioinspired Robotics podcast episode, Wyss Founding Core Faculty Member Radhika Nagpal discusses swarm collectives, as well as the challenges faced by women in the engineering and computer science fields.

Nagpal is developing programming paradigms that enable new types of robotic systems to mimic the collective behaviors of living creatures. Inspired by bee swarms and termite colonies, she is applying nature’s approach to decentralized cooperation to engineer new collective systems that meet real-world challenges. Biological systems, from embryos to social insects, depend upon the coordinated behavior of large numbers of individual agents to achieve highly complex outcomes — termites build skyscrapers and embryonic cells develop into healthy babies. Nagpal is building new types of distributed systems — from multi-modular robots and robot swarms, to vast sensor networks — that have similar capabilities.

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

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The team, comprised of Daniela Rus, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Director of CSAIL, Cagdas Onal, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and Andrew Marchese, a doctoral candidate in engineering at MIT, created the robot to be autonomous. This means it has all the necessary sensing, actuation and computation on board. Its flexible body is made of silicone rubber. The robot fish is able to swish from side to side as onboard gas inflates and deflates different parts of its body. This means that the robot is flexible and can maneuver like a real fish—making a full C-turn with its body in just 100 milliseconds.

According to Rus, this type of soft robot is inherently safe, saying “As robots penetrate the physical world and start interacting with people more and more, it’s much easier to make robots safe if their bodies are so wonderfully soft that there’s no danger if they whack you.”

The fish can perform 20-30 agile escape maneuvers before its carbon dioxide canister runs out. The team is working on an updated version that will be able to swim for around 30 minutes using water to inflate its interior channels rather than carbon dioxide.

In the not so distant future, the fish-bot could be put to use for covert science missions where it might be able to infiltrate schools of real fish to collect data about their behavior.  

The field of soft robotics holds great potential for the development of smart machines that can adjust their shape and size to fit variable environments and interact with living things without causing them harm. Possible applications include: mine detection, assistive healthcare, search and rescue missions and space instrument repair.

In this second lecture hosted by the Scuola Superiore S. Anna, Matteo Cianchetti builds on the previous lecture to talk about building soft actuators for soft robots. In Matteo’s lecture, titled “Soft actuator design methods“,  he explains that the devil is in the details, but that it’s possible to build soft actuators by insightfully exploiting the properties of Shape Memory Alloy (SMA). Want to learn how?

Guest Lecture – “Can ‘Synthetic Methodology’ cause a paradigm shift?” by Minoru Asada

In this talk Prof. Minoru Asada from the University of Osaka, in Japan, shows the results and discusses the underlying principles of his research on developmental robotics and the of the psychological development of the basic human cognitive functions in the baby and even in the fetus! This is an iconic example of synthetic methodology application.

How can we simulate the development of a fetus, for example? And above all, can ‘Synthetic Methodology’ really cause a paradigm shift? Watch Asada’s  lecture here:

About the ShanghAI Lectures

While in the classical approach “intelligence” was essentially viewed as information processing taking place in the brain, the more recent insight that interaction with the environment is of central importance is gaining acceptance. This has led to the metaphor of embodiment, i.e., that intelligence is always a property of an entire organism — an idea that has far-reaching implications and often leads to surprising insights, but which has not so far been widely exploited in industry practice.

The ShanghAI Lectures project aims to:

• Build a sustainable community of students and researchers in the area of Embodied Intelligence
• Make education and knowledge on cutting-edge scientific topics accessible to everyone
• Explore novel methods of knowledge transfer
• Overcome the complexity of a multi-cultural and interdisciplinary learning context
• Bring global teaching to a new level

These lectures about Natural and Artificial Intelligence have been held via videoconference at the University Carlos III of Madrid in Spain, the University of Zurich in Switzerland, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna of Pisa, Italy, Humboldt University Berlin in Germany, University of Plymouth and University of Salford in the UK, and 10 other universities around the globe. Students from the participating universities are still working together on the exercises, using Webots by Cyberbotics, and Ludobots by the University of Vermont.

The lectures have also been streamed to allow remote participation to anybody.

The ShanghAI Lectures differ from ‘conventional’ MOOCs as they exploit telecommunication technology to build a global, distributed lecture hall that allows rich interaction rather than simply implementing the good old fashioned TV broadcasting model on a different medium. They also differ from other AI courses as they propose a new paradigm approach to embodied cognition (a.k.a. AI and Robotics). It is a kind of Copernican revolution with respect to GOFAI and its robotics application — and thus a research program for the coming decades.

This year I coordinated the lectures, with help from Prof. Rolf Pfeifer and Dr. Nathan Labhart at the University of Zurich . Rolf Pfeifer and I provided the context (introduction, moderation, and conclusion). As always, there were 2-3  invited guest lectures each week.

Hosted by Prof. Cecilia Laschi from the Scuola Superiore S. Anna in Pisa, Italy, this ShanghAI episode puts together contrasting approaches to ‘embodied intelligence’ and ‘embodied cognition’ in her lecture titled “How an octopus can help build a robot”.

Laschi, who among many other things has coordinated the European ‘Octopus’ project,  shows a radical approach to embodiment starting from the bottom-up, by taking us through the development of the physical soft structure of a robot octopus. Soft robotics has a lot to say about embodied cognition and morphological computation, and also involves several non-trivial engineering challenges. Can building an artificial octopus really help to advance robotics? Don’t miss Cecilia Laschi’s lecture:

Guest Lecture – “From scene segmentation to task based grasping” by Danica Kragic

In this talk Prof. Danica Kragic from the KTH in Stockolm, Sweden shows the benefits of embodiment to grasping – from a top-down approach based on computer vision, machine learning and AI. Kragic has led the Grasp european project, and is a leading researcher in the area of AI and robotics. Whatever DARPA tells you, the problem of grasping still isn’t solved. For example we still don’t have a robot that is able to take the dishes from a real world sink and put them into a dishwasher (this would be a killer application, do you agree?) How long will we have to wait?

A top-down approach to solving ‘real problems’ within the embodied approach to AI and robotics still has several basic research questions to answer. If you have been following the previous lectures you may have noticed that many researchers are approaching the issue of embodied cognition with sometimes very different methods and models, and a synthesis at the level of concrete mathematical models is still missing.

The good news is that we may be on right path. Find out what Kragic has to say on the matter:

Guest Lecture – “Hard Work for Robotics from Soft Actuators” by Bram Vanderborght

Soft robots need soft actuators, and building soft actuators is not a trivial task. Prof. Bram Vanderborght is with the Vrije University Brussels and does cutting-edge research on soft actuators, in particular in legged locomotion of humanoid robots. Dive into the modeling and engineering challenges and subtle solutions presented by Bram Vanderborght in his talk:

About the ShanghAI Lectures

While in the classical approach “intelligence” was essentially viewed as information processing taking place in the brain, the more recent insight that interaction with the environment is of central importance is gaining acceptance. This has led to the metaphor of embodiment, i.e., that intelligence is always a property of an entire organism — an idea that has far-reaching implications and often leads to surprising insights, but which has not so far been widely exploited in industry practice.

The ShanghAI Lectures project aims to:

• Build a sustainable community of students and researchers in the area of Embodied Intelligence
• Make education and knowledge on cutting-edge scientific topics accessible to everyone
• Explore novel methods of knowledge transfer
• Overcome the complexity of a multi-cultural and interdisciplinary learning context
• Bring global teaching to a new level

These lectures about Natural and Artificial Intelligence have been held via videoconference at the University Carlos III of Madrid in Spain, the University of Zurich in Switzerland, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna of Pisa, Italy, Humboldt University Berlin in Germany, University of Plymouth and University of Salford in the UK, and 10 other universities around the globe. Students from the participating universities are still working together on the exercises, using Webots by Cyberbotics, and Ludobots by the University of Vermont.

The lectures have also been streamed to allow remote participation to anybody.

The ShanghAI Lectures differ from ‘conventional’ MOOCs as they exploit telecommunication technology to build a global, distributed lecture hall that allows rich interaction rather than simply implementing the good old fashioned TV broadcasting model on a different medium. They also differ from other AI courses as they propose a new paradigm approach to embodied cognition (a.k.a. AI and Robotics). It is a kind of Copernican revolution with respect to GOFAI and its robotics application — and thus a research program for the coming decades.

This year I coordinated the lectures, with help from Prof. Rolf Pfeifer and Dr. Nathan Labhart at the University of Zurich . Rolf Pfeifer and I provided the context (introduction, moderation, and conclusion). As always, there were 2-3  invited guest lectures each week.