A Decade of Robophysics at the APS March Meeting

We hosted the first Robophysics Focus Session at the 2015 APS March Meeting. What has been learned and what has been accomplished during the last decade? In this talk, through examples in my group's research, I will give an update on why the study of robots from a physics perspective remains intellectually rich, useful in understanding living systems, and a powerful intermediate step in the development of future artificial life. I will discuss how the study of robots as self-deforming extended bodies interacting with spatially and temporally asymmetric environments brings a novel class of systems to physics, analogous to how study of forced elongate systems (polymers) led to advances in soft matter physics. From a biological modeling perspective, robophysics plays an important role in complementing traditional theoretical (analytic) models and now well-developed numerical techniques for animals and robots and can thus act as a "third way" of modeling living systems across scales. From a practical perspective, via discussion of the impacts of robophysics on the efforts of Ground Control Robotics, a company I co-founded in 2022, I will demonstrate how robophysical models form an important bridge between principles discovered in living systems and implementation of such principles in practical artificial systems. Advances in the ability to create and control increasingly mechanically sophisticated devices bode well for the future of robots as objects of interest to physicists. But to keep up with the ability to engineer novel self-deforming systems, guiding theoretical principles for a general theory of robophysics are needed.