Materials Science and Engineering Seminar - Professor Ryan Truby of Northwestern University
About
Robots still lag far behind living organisms in efficiency, adaptability, and resilience. Most are built from rigid, motorized mechanisms and lean on ever more computationally intensive perception, control, and learning pipelines to cope with the real world. Animals, by contrast, derive these capabilities directly from their material composition and morphology. For example, muscles provide compliant, back-drivable actuation; event-based mechanoreceptors translate body-environment interactions into rich feedback; and multiscale tissue architectures impart toughness and graceful degradation. Northwestern University’s Ryan Truby, along with his research group, the Robotic Matter Lab, develops robotic materials, or material systems that empower robots to operate, learn, and adapt in real-world environments as animals do. In this talk, Truby will show how the team establishes performance-through-processing relationships to inversely design robotic materials for new actuation and sensing c
