Micro-Swimmers and Soft Robotics

17/02/2020

Micro-Swimmers and Soft Robotics: a Research Workshop of the Israel Science Foundation

The frontiers of tiny robotics were advanced this week in a pioneering workshop held jointly by Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and the  Israel Science Foundation

Entitled: “Micro-swimmers and Soft Robotics” the event was organized by Prof. Alex Leshansky of the Faculty of Chemical Engineering, Prof. Yizhar Or and Amir Gat, both from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering. 

Research Workshop of the Israel Science Foundation on Micro-Swimmers and Soft Robotics

The development of micro- and nanomachines that can manoever through complex fluidic environments offers great promise for the technologies of the future. Innovations in this field are especially active within biomedical applications. These can range from catalytically driven nanowires to magnetically, light or acoustically-driven colloids. Some propellers are flexible, and exploit an ability to change shape to achieve propulsion.  This capaity for continuous shape-changing is also an essential feature of Soft Robotics – an emerging bio-inspired concept of actuation with promising applications for robotic locomotion and manipulation.​ 

Held in the first week of February 2020, the research workshop brought together world-leading international and Israeli experts involved in the design, fabrication, theory, and control of artificial micro-swimmers, as well as leading scientists in the field of Soft Robotics. 

The list of invited speakers included Bradley Nelson (ETH, Zurich), who spoke about programmable magnetic micromachines; Peer Fischer (Max Planck Institute, Stuttgart) with a talk on acoustic-powered and chemical nanopropellers; Joseph Wang (UCSD) who gave a talk on in-vivo applications of micromotors; and Moshe Shoam (Technion) who spoke about the future of small-scale medical robotics. Speakers from the Soft Robotics community included Metin Sitti (Max Planck Institute, Stuttgart) who presented bio-inspired magnetic soft swimmers; Hod Lipson (Columbia University), who presented his work on soft actuators for soft robotic; and Rob Shepherd (Cornell) with a talk on adding soft materials to small-scale robots. 

More details about the onference (website & program): https://www.swimmerssoro.com/