engineering design with new techniques and new materials. The old way
of design in which we assume decoupled, low-order, block-diagonal
models is breaking down at all levels and all scales. This presents numerous problems as our ad
hoc design methods are not able to properly account for, test and
validate systems of greatly increasing complexity. But it also presents
numerous opportunities for new capabilities, such as soft robotics, in
which the behavior of a designed artifact is tightly coupled to its
environment.
In this talk, I will describe steps we are taking towards the
fabrication of new types of intelligent polymers as building blocks for
soft robots. Using shape deposition manufacturing techniques, we are
attempting to produce 1-D, 2-D and 3-D stock polymers that incorporate sensing, actuation,
cognition, and structure into convenient, specifiable components. Our
cognitive architecture is based on fully-interconnected Synthetic
Neural Networks, which implement parallel artificial neurons from
polymer electronics. We have produced memristors (bistable,
programmable resistors) to create artificial synapses and have a simple
design for a single-transistor artificial soma to achieve a sigmoidal
activation function, yielding the possibility of producing synthetic,
trainable, massively parallel cognitive circuits. Our actuation
mechanisms, which traditionally have been difficult to achieve in
all-polymer materials with usable power levels, are based on active and
passive fluids. We are using “active” fluid-based actuation schemes,
such as water hammer based impulsive actuation, to channel meaningful
forces for actuation as well as “passive” fluid-based actuation from
electrorheological and magnetorheological fluids which can be used to
dampen forces.