Embodied Intelligence for Soft Robots

In contrast to human beings where intelligence is highly concentrated in the brain, intelligence in other biological systems can be distributed throughout the body, where some sort of computation is performed by the organism’s ‘hardware’, which is generally known as embodied intelligence. Amoebae and plants almost exclusively rely on this embodied intelligence to survive. Their particular shape and material composition allows them to take advantage of intrinsic physics to interact with their environment. Mechanical nonlinearities are a key ingredient in achieving embodied intelligence. While they are absent from traditional rigid robots, geometric, structural and material nonlinearities are abundant in soft robots made of elastomeric materials, which makes them ideal candidates to develop this form of bio-inspired artificial intelligence.  This project aims at designing soft robots with intelligent functions that are not encoded in the algorithm of a controller, but are coming from soft mechanisms embedded in the hardware of the robot. By harnessing mechanical nonlinearities, in the form of elastic instabilities, the goal is to create inflatable robots that are able to adapt their functionality based on triggers from the environment.