Professor George M. Whitesides, Harvard University: "Soft Robotics"

Beskrivelse:
H.C. Ørsted Lecture, 26th of May 2016.
Professor George M. Whitesides, Harvard University: ‘Soft Robotics’

Abstract
«Robotics» is a field with broad interest: it combines mechanical engineering, information science, and animal physiology with manufacturing, workforce development, economics, and other areas. The most highly developed classes of robots have been build based on conceptual models provided by the body-plans of animals with skeletons (humans, horses), and have made it possible to carry out tasks that humans and animals could not (for a variety of reasons).
We are interested in robots based on a different, simpler class of organisms (invertebrates: starfish, worms, octopi). Because these organisms, and the robots having designs stimulated by them, have no skeletons, they provide enormous opportunities in materials and polymer science, rather than primarily in mechanical engineering.
This seminar will outline one approach to soft robots, and suggest problems and opportunities in this new field.