Computational Mechanics for Plant-Inspired Soft Robots (Talk)

Soft robotics, an emerging field, focuses on creating flexible and adaptable robots inspired by the pliability found in living organisms. Developed through advancements in materials and manufacturing techniques, soft robots offer unique capabilities such as delicate object manipulation and safe human interaction. In soft robot design, the greatest challenge currently lies in identifying a structure capable of executing a targeted maneuver considering its intricate mechanical behavior. A possible design concept is to learn from biological systems and transfer the functionalities to biomimetic technologies. Recent advancements in soft robotics have turned to plants as inspiration, because they offer attractive characteristics such as resilience, self-healing, autonomy and continuous mechanisms. Hereby, the underlying biological cells act as a microstructure enabling a motion of the macrostructure and introducing intelligence into the system. Yet, before a biological function principle can be transferred to a biomimetic device, it must be fully understood. High-fidelity computer simulations are particularly suitable for analyzing biological motions within a so-called reverse biomimetics approach, but also for technical mechanisms. In this context, computational mechanics can be seen as an enabling technology, allowing for the representation of soft robots as the continuous and flexible structures they truly are. This talk aims to showcase my recent research efforts to integrate the two fields of computational mechanics and soft robotics deeply. Above all, my vision is to go even one step further and not only “reconstruct” the mechanical behavior of biomimetic soft robots through computational analysis, but also to advance methods in computational mechanics such that a systematic inverse design of these complex structures comes within reach.