Abstract
Soft robotic systems often present bio-mimicking designs that resemble actuation mechanisms of certain biological organisms, such as swimmers resembling fish or flagellated microorganisms. However, there are some unique properties from living organisms that are specially challenging to obtain in their artificial counterparts, such as self-healing, adaptability, or bio-sensing capabilities. Among these capabilities, it should be remarked on the high level of adaptability, activity and autonomy that such biomaterials present, following the three principles of animacy. Ideally, such three aspects should be accounted for when designing bio-hybrid robots, regardless of their size or further application.
In the field of bio-hybrid robotics, several platforms across different scales have been developed, but the ones based on living muscles have attracted increasing attention. Regarding the design and fabrication of these robotic platforms, some approaches demonstrated the advantages of applying non-biomimetic designs in order to obtain emerging behavior, like the using of self-stimulating serpentine structures in living robots actuated using skeletal muscle cells. Another important challenge in the development of such living robots is the integration of control systems, which could be aimed at guidance purposes to gather real time information over robot performance (i.e., exerted force). We particularly explored the will be covered the implementation of flexible strain sensors for real-time force detection in non-modified skeletal muscle actuators, which is of great interest to allow for better automation and improved animacy of such devices in the future. In this talk, it will be covered from the animacy aspect not only on the design such muscle-based living robots, but also the integration of sensing elements while stablishing which are the main challenges on the scaling down and application of such robotics systems.
Biography
Dr. Maria Guix received her PhD in Chemistry in Chemistry from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) under the supervision of Prof. Merkoçi’s group at Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2). Apart from working on the interaction of nanomaterials in biosensing platforms, . during her PhD she did two short internships related to the development of catalytic nanomotors, first in EMPA (Switzerland) and then in the University of California San Diego (USA) under the supervision of Prof. Joseph Wang. She later joined Prof. Oliver Schmidt’s group as a postdoctoral researcher at IFW Dresden, developing biocompatible micromotors for biomedical applications. Afterwards, she moved to Purdue University to work on the automation of magnetic microrobots for safe manipulation tasks by using visual-based control methods. After her postdoctoral stage at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) at Prof. Samuel Sánchez’ group working in the development of advanced functional living robots, she just joined in a tenure track position at the University of Barcelona at the ChemInFlow group, where she is stablishing a new line of living robotics aim towards its miniaturization by exploiting microfluidic devices, as well as also seeking for the integration of flexible sensors in such platforms for a better understanding of the undergoing biological events.