Abstract:

Intelligence of physical agents is not only enabled by their computational intelligence in their brain, but also by their physical intelligence encoded in their body. This presentation reports bioinspired and abstract physical intelligence methods designed and implemented in small-scale robots from insect scale down to cell-size scale. Light-powered phototactic and bacteria-driven chemo/magnetotactic microswimmers are presented at the cell-size scale. At the milliscale, bioinspired soft-bodied robots with magneto-elastic composite bodies are presented to navigate in complex, confined spaces. Soft-body design enables active shape programming-based adaptive and multimodal navigation, diverse functions, and safe operation. These soft millirobots are aimed to be used as implantable wireless medical devices in the small-diameter, tortuous, risky and hard-to-reach blood vessels and other sites inside the human body. Liquid crystal elastomer types of stimuli-responsive materials are also integrated with magneto-elastic composites towards self-sensing and self-adapting millirobots. Finally, mechanical computing systems using bistable metastructures are proposed to encode physical computing in millimachines.

Biography:

Metin Sitti is the President and Professor of Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey since fall 2023. Formerly, he was a Director of the Physical Intelligence Department at Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, Germany (2014-2023), Professor at ETH Zurich, Switzerland (2020-2024), and Professor at Carnegie Mellon University (2002-2014) and a research scientist at UC Berkeley (1999-2002) in USA. He received his BSc (1992) and MSc (1994) degrees from Boğaziçi University, Turkey, and PhD degree from University of Tokyo, Japan (1999). His research interests include small-scale mobile robotics, bio-inspiration, wireless medical devices, and physical intelligence. He is a National Academy of Engineering (NAE) Member in USA and an IEEE Fellow. He received the Highly Cited Researcher recognition (2021, 2022, 2023), Breakthrough of the Year Award in the Falling Walls World Science Summit (2020), ERC Advanced Grant (2019), Rahmi Koç Science Medal (2018), SPIE Nanoengineering Pioneer Award (2011), and NSF CAREER Award (2005). He is the editor-in-chief of Progress in Biomedical Engineering and Journal of Micro-Bio Robotics journals and associate editor in Science Advances journal.