Stanford Seminar - Engineering physical principles of embryonic morphogenesis in robotic collectives

April 26, 2024
Elliot Hawkes, UCSB

Embryonic tissue is an active material able to self-shape, self-heal, and control its strength in space and time. Realizing these features in synthetic materials would change static objects—with properties set at design time—into dynamic programmable matter. However, unlike tissue, which achieves these capabilities by rearranging tight-packed cells throughout the tissue, current material-like robotic collectives can generally only move units at the perimeter of the collective. In this talk, I will describe how by encoding key tissue-inspired processes into robotic units, here we build material-like robotic collectives capable of topological rearrangement throughout the collective, enabling spatiotemporal control of shape and strength.