CAREER: Adaptive Actuation and Control in Embodied Biohybrid Robots

Animals are often a source of inspiration in robotic design. By designing from animal blueprints, engineers can create robotic systems capable of walking, running, crawling, swimming, and even flying. However, even with the advances in robotics over the past decades, robotic systems still fall short of many of the capabilities seen in biological animals.

One key difference between existing robots and their animal counterparts is that biological systems are made up of soft, adaptable materials, including muscles for actuation and neurons for control. This CAREER award investigates how to fabricate robust, adaptable actuators for biohybrid robots using living muscle, how these actuators adapt to exercise, and how to control biohybrid robots with living neurons.

Additionally, this CAREER award supports educational and outreach initiatives to improve recruitment and retention of students and faculty in robotics and STEM. Accessible age-appropriate educational materials based on the research outcomes will be developed, made available to middle and high school teachers, and integrated into a graduate course on Bioinspired Robotics.

The research team will host virtual and in-person outreach events to introduce students to bioinspired and biohybrid robotics. Undergraduate students will be recruited for summer research experiences in biohybrid robotics and modeling. Finally, the investigator will promote tools for recruitment and retention of faculty in robotics.

This 5-year CAREER project will result in bioactuators capable of interfacing with a range of robotic structures via tendon-like interfaces, bioinspired neural networks for bioactuator control, and the ability to perform basic ‘programming’ of biohybrid robots. Biohybrid robotics directly harnesses living tissues as renewable engineering materials.

In particular, muscle-based bioactuators are self-healing, compliant, and adapt to loading. Whereas most biohybrid research to date has focused on biological materials as individual components of the system, approaches for the integrated design, fabrication, and ‘programming’ of robust bioactuators and biological control networks are needed to improve biohybrid robot performance and broaden applicability.

To meet this need, this CAREER project will (1) enable adaptive bioactuation of a wide range of robotic peripheries through the creation of embedded biocompatible interfaces, (2) model and fabricate simple biological neural networks to control bioactuators, and (3) train integrated bioactuators and biological neural networks. Not only will the proposed research approach lead to advances in bioactuation and control, but it will also specifically focus on integrated biohybrid robot development. ‘Programmable’ biohybrid robots have applications in medicine where small-scale biocompatible systems could be used as self-actuating stents or medical implants, or as functional components of neuromuscular tissues-on-a-chip for drug-screening and neuroscience.

The proposed research lays the foundation for addressing future challenges in biohybrid robotics, including integrating various sensing modalities into biohybrid robot systems, understanding the effect of embodiment on neuromuscular control circuits, and studying emergent dynamics in distributed biohybrid actuation systems. The research approach in this CAREER proposal will be integrated with an educational and outreach plan to (1) incorporate neuromuscular modeling in biohybrid robotics curriculum, (2) improve retention of students in robotics through biohybrid robot experiences, and (3) build tools to improve the visibility of a broad range of faculty in robotics towards improving retention.

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.