Vision Statement: Interactive Materials–Drivers of Future Robotic Systems

2020

Article

pf

A robot senses its environment, processes the sensory information, acts in response to these inputs, and possibly communicates with the outside world. Robots generally achieve these tasks with electronics-based hardware or by receiving inputs from some external hardware. In contrast, simple microorganisms can autonomously perceive, act, and communicate via purely physicochemical processes in soft material systems. A key property of biological systems is that they are built from energy-consuming ‘active’ units. Exciting developments in material science show that even very simple artificial active building blocks can show surprisingly rich emergent behaviors. Active non-equilibrium systems are therefore predicted to play an essential role to realize interactive materials. A major challenge is to find robust ways to couple and integrate the energy-consuming building blocks to the mechanical structure of the material. However, success in this endeavor will lead to a new generation of sophisticated micro- and soft-robotic systems that can operate autonomously.

@article{Fischer2020,
  title = {Vision Statement: Interactive Materials–Drivers of Future Robotic Systems},
  author = {Fischer, P.},
  journal = {Advanced Materials},
  volume = {32},
  number = {20},
  pages = {1905953},
  month = jan,
  year = {2020},
  note = {Invited Vision Statement},
  doi = {10.1002/adma.201905953},
  url = { https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.201905953},
  month_numeric = {1}
}