The goal of this project is to model, design, fabricate and study micrometer to centimeter size soft bio-hybrid robots that bring together artificial elements and living biological cells. Living components promise to provide these robots with a natural organism's abilities to self-assemble, heal, grow, and to adapt to varying environments. This project is made possible by recent advances in fabrication techniques that allow artificial elements to be combined with an array of living cell types such as muscles and neurons. The proposed mini bio-hybrid robots are thus compliant, configurable, biocompatible, and can generate power from local nutrients. Bio-hybrid robots can also exhibit adaptive behaviors in response to uncertain environments, and thus offer the promise of a host of high impact applications including localized drug delivery, environmental exploration and chemical sensing, evaluation of potential surgical sites within the body, and precision manipulation and fabrication. This is in line with the national need to reduce healthcare costs by enhancing medical effectiveness as well as stimulating the development of advanced manufacturing techniques to increase competitiveness. This effort speaks to a broad audience: what can spark the imagination of potential young scientists better than bringing tiny robots to life. Excitement in this area will be leveraged via activities ranging from museum exhibitions to the deployment of high school and K-12 intuitive learning modules, in order to foster interest in advanced computing, mechanics, math, manufacturing, and biology.
Soft robotics is currently constrained by a lack of rigorous engineering methods. Intuition-driven approaches are further strained in the case of bio-hybrid systems due to the inclusion of the living component, which is even less well understood. This project seeks to create a systematic approach based on modeling, simulation, and fabrication to overcome these limitations and enable deployment and scalability. Central to this project is the concept of functional units, hierarchical bio-hybrid assemblies that can be combined into integrated robotic systems capable of higher level functions, much like the organization of living organisms and object-oriented software. By embracing this analogy, five fundamental building blocks (muscle and neuron cells, elastomers, multi-stable buckling structures, wireless conformable electronics) are considered, so as to: (1) introduce a novel mathematical formalism based on Cosserat rod assemblies to model their mechanical response, actuation and interaction with the environment; (2) develop software to simulate the dynamics of composite functional units and to optimize them according to a desired target behavior; (3) fabricate and test obtained solutions, and update models based on experiments; (4) showcase new understanding by engineering integrated bots able to perform complex tasks. Thus, this effort overall deals with enabling the vision of autonomous, adaptive mini-bots and laying the analytical, computational and experimental foundations of a bio-hybrid soft engineering science.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
