Soft and Biohybrid Robotics Course

Course Abstract

Soft and biohybrid robots are emerging fields taking inspiration from Nature to create integrated robots that are inherently safer to interact with. You will be able to create the structures, actuators, sensors, models, controllers, and machine learning architectures exploiting the deformable nature of these robots. You will apply the learned principles to challenges of your research domain.

Lecturer: Prof. Robert Katzschmann

Occurence: Offered every Spring Semester at ETH Zurich.

Objectives

The class foucses on four learning objectives:

Learning Objective 1: Convert any robotics challenge into a functional soft robotic physical prototype
Step 1: Formulate suitable functional requirements
Step 2: Select actuator material
Step 3: Design + fabricate suitable for the task
Step 4: Controller for basic functionality
Step 5: Learning Approach for complex robotic skills

Learning Objective 2: Formulate control and learning frameworks to highly articulated robots in real life scenarios
Step 1: Formulate the dynamic skills needed for the real life scenario
Step 2: Pick or combine suitable control and learning frameworks given the robot at hand
Step 3: Evaluate the control approach for a real life scenario
Step 4: Modify and enhance the control approach and repeat the evaluation

Learning Objective 3: Apply the principle of mechanical impedance and embodied intelligence to any research challenge within any domain
Step 1: Identify the moving aspects of the problem
Step 2: Choose and design the passive and actively-controlled degrees of freedom
Step 3: Pick the actuation material based on suitability to your challenge
Step 4: Design in detail multiple combinations of body and brain
Step 5: Simulate, build, test, fail, and repeat this often and quickly until the soft robot works for simple settings
Step 6: Upgrade and validate the robot for performances in real world conditions

Learning Objective 4: Rethink approaches to robotics by moving towards designs made of living materials
Step 1: Identify what problems could be easier to solve with a complex living material
Step 2: Scout for available works that have potentially tackled the problem with a living material
Step 3: Formulate a hypothesis for your new approach with a living material
Step 4: Design conceptually a minimum viable prototype (MVP) that highlights your new approach

Content

Students will cover a range of latest research insights on materials, fabrication technologies, and modeling approaches to design, simulate, and build soft and biohybrid robots. There are seven parts to the class.

Part 1: Functional and intelligent materials for use in soft and biohybrid robotic applications
Part 2: Design and design morphologies of soft robotic actuators and sensors
Part 3: Fabrication techniques including 3D printing, casting, roll-to-roll, tissue engineering
Part 4: Biohybrid robotics including microrobots and macrorobots; tissue engineering
Part 5: Mechanical modeling including minimal parameter models, finite-element models and ML-based models
Part 6: Closed-loop controllers of soft robots that exploit the robot's impedance and dynamics for locomotion and manipulation tasks
Part 7: Machine Learning approaches to soft robotics, for design synthesis, modeling, and control

Semester-long robotic demonstrations will further deepen the knowledge learned during the class.

Lecture Notes

All class materials including slides, recordings, assignment infos, pre-reads, and tutorial summaries can be found on Moodle.

Literature

1) Yasa, Toshimitsu, Michelis, Jones, Filippi, Buchner, Katzschmann. "Overview of Soft Robotics." Annual Reviews (2022).
2) Wang, Liyu, Surya G. Nurzaman, and Fumiya Iida. "Soft-material robotics." Foundations and Trends in Robotics (2017).
3) Polygerinos, Panagiotis, et al. "Soft robotics: Review of fluid‐driven intrinsically soft devices; manufacturing, sensing, control, and applications in human‐robot interaction." Advanced Engineering Materials 19.12 (2017): 1700016.
4) Verl, Alexander, et al. Soft Robotics. Berlin, Germany:: Springer, 2015.
5) Cianchetti, Matteo, et al. "Biomedical applications of soft robotics." Nature Reviews Materials 3.6 (2018): 143-153.
6) Ricotti, Leonardo, et al. "Biohybrid actuators for robotics: A review of devices actuated by living cells." Science Robotics 2.12 (2017).
7) Sun, Lingyu, et al. "Biohybrid robotics with living cell actuation." Chemical Society Reviews 49.12 (2020): 4043-4069.

Prerequisites / Notice

Dynamics, Controls, Introduction to Robotics; only offered to students at master or PhD level.

More course details can be found on ETH's Course Catalogue for Spring 2024.