Adaptive robot morphology and behavioral control policy through responsive composite materials

Robots generally excel at specific tasks in structured environments, but lack the versatility and adaptability required to interact with the real world. In this talk, I will introduce several soft robot platforms that can adapt both their shape and behavior to accommodate different tasks or environments. While actuation alone may temporarily change a robot’s shape, I will show that the ability to change resting shape is an advantage of soft robots, and that shape control can offset computationally-expensive tasks such as gait changes and obstacle avoidance. The focus will be on the responsive composites that enable these functional capabilities, including variable stiffness materials for move-and-hold shapeshifting applications, switchable stretchability materials for adaptive trajectories of volumetrically-expanding actuators, and stretchable circuitry for material-embedded computation.