Rolf Pfeifer - Soft Robotics: The Next Generation of Intelligent Machines

Researchers from robotics and artificial intelligence increasingly agree that ideas from biology and self-organization can strongly benefit the design of autonomous robots. Biological organisms have evolved to perform and survive in a world characterized by rapid changes, high uncertainty, indefinite richness, and limited availability of information. The term - Soft Robotics - designates a new generation of robots capable of functioning in the real world by capitalizing on 'soft' designs at various levels: surface (skin), movement mechanisms (muscles, tendons), and interaction with other agents (smooth, friendly interaction). Industrial robots, in contrast, operate in highly controlled environments with no or very little uncertainty. The next generation of intelligent machines - robots - will be of the 'soft' kind. Professor Rolf Pfeiferwill be introducing the tendon-driven soft robot Roboy that he and his colleagues have been developing in their laboratory over the last few months. Although many challenges remain, concepts from biologically inspired soft robotics will eventually enable researchers to engineer machines for the real world that possess at least some of the desirable properties of biological organisms, such as adaptivity, robustness, and versatility.

Rolf Pfeifer will also talk at the Studium Generale on Tuesday evening (http://studium.hosting.rug.nl/Inleidende-teksten/How-to-build-cognition.html). His AI colloquium talk in the afternoon will be a bit more technical than his Studium Generale talk.