Arts, sciences, and engineering faculty members and graduate students discuss ways to control the movements of the soft-body robot. (photo by Melody Ko)

An Interdisciplinary Incubator
By focusing on how animals move, a group of Tufts researchers are changing how we think about (and may one day build) robots.

"Located a half mile from the Tufts Medford campus at 200 Boston Avenue, the Advanced Technology Laboratory acts as an incubator to bring researchers together and speed up the evolution of ideas. Engineers use biological principles to help design and build structures, which in turn give biologists better ways to explain what they observe. Biomimetics, or mimicking nature, specifically in the form of caterpillars, was just such an interdisciplinary problem..."
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Soft Robots: a new way to think about hardware
Dean's Faculty Forum

"Every semester, Dean Sternberg sponsors a Dean's Faculty Forum that features the research and scholarship of faculty members from Arts and Sciences. The Forum is structured with a lecture by one faculty member on a particular topic followed by commentary from a faculty discussant. The most important aspects of the Dean's Faculty Forum are that it appeals to a broad audience and gets people excited about the scholarship being done at Tufts." [This description is quoted from the Dean's Faculty Forum].

Recently, the director of the Biomimetic Devices Laboratory, Professor Barry Trimmer (Biology), presented his talk entitled Soft robots: a new way to think about hardware at the Dean's Faculty Forum. The talk and subsequent discussion focused on how motion control problems have been solved in nature and how they can be adapted for our own uses. This "biomimetic" approach is currently being used at Tufts to develop a new class of robots entirely fabricated from soft materials. It is expected that these soft robots will be able to climb textured surfaces, crawl along ropes and wires and burrow into winding, confined spaces. View a video of the talk >>

Biomimicry at the Museum of Modern Art

The prototype was recently featured in an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The exhibit, entitled Design and the Elastic Mind , was open from February 24th - May 12th earlier this year and included "objects, projects, and concepts offered by teams of designers, scientists, and engineers from all over the world, ranging from the nanoscale to the cosmological scale."

Additional News

A group of faculty, post-docs and students from the Advanced Technology Laboratory recently presented their work at the Adaptive Movements in Animals and Machines (AMAM) conference at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH (June 1-6, 2008). This international conference takes place every three years providing a forum for leading biologists and engineers in the area of biomimetic robotics to share ideas. Students, Meghan Kate, Linnea van Griethuijsen and Huai-ti Lin presented posters on soft-bodied locomotion and the development of a soft-robot prototype. Professor Barry Trimmer gave a plenary seminar entitled "Neuromechanics using soft materials: animal models and supple robots".



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