Stanford Seminar - Creating Life-like Robots: From Musculoskeletal Designs to Biohybrid Innovations

January 24, 2025 Robert Katzschmann, ETH Zurich Living robots represent a new frontier in engineering materials for robotic systems, incorporating biological living cells and synthetic materials into their design. These bio-hybrid robots are dynamic and intelligent, potentially harnessing living matter’s capabilities, such as growth, regeneration, morphing, biodegradation, and environmental adaptation. Such attributes position bio-hybrid devices as a transformative force in robotics development, promising enhanced dexterity, adaptive behaviors, sustainable production, robust performance, and environmental stewardship. Nature’s musculoskeletal design can act as an inspiration for both artificial and living robots. We will explore recent advances in artificial electrohydraulic musculoskeletal robots, which employ electrohydraulic actuators to produce lifelike muscle contractions and adaptive motions, as demonstrated in our recent work published in Nature Communications. We will also discuss our breakthroughs in vision-controlled inkjet printing for robotics from our Nature paper, as well as xolographic biofabrication techniques for biohybrid swimmers presented at RoboSoft. Additionally, I’ll share insights from our computational optimization of musculoskeletal systems featured at Humanoids. Together, these projects showcase how musculoskeletal, bio-hybrid, and computational techniques are opening new frontiers in robotics interaction and manipulation. About the speaker: https://srl.ethz.ch/the-group/prof-robert-katzschmann.html More about the course can be found here: https://stanfordasl.github.io/robotics_seminar/ View the entire AA289 Stanford Robotics and Autonomous Systems Seminar playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoROMvodv4rMeercb-kvGLUrOq4HR6BZD ► Check out the entire catalog of courses and programs available through Stanford Online: https://online.stanford.edu/explore View our Robotics and Autonomous Systems Graduate Certificate: https://