Robots still lag far behind living organisms in efficiency, adaptability, and resilience. Most are built from rigid, motorized mechanisms and lean on ever more computationally intensive perception, control, and learning pipelines to cope with the real world. Animals, by contrast, derive these capabilities directly from their material composition and morphology. For example, muscles provide compliant, back-drivable actuation; event-based mechanoreceptors translate body-environment interactions into rich feedback; and multiscale tissue architectures impart toughness and graceful degradation. Northwestern University’s Ryan Truby, along with his research group, the Robotic Matter Lab, develops robotic materials, or material systems that empower robots to operate, learn, and adapt in real-world environments as animals do.
 
In this talk, Truby will show how the team establishes performance-through-processing relationships to inversely design robotic materials for new actuation and sensing capabilities, while advancing digital design and additive manufacturing platforms that reveal new structure-property relationships in soft, architected, and structural robotic materials. He will present the team’s work in architecting elastomers from structural to molecular scales as artificial muscles; then introduce efforts to create iontronic materials for robot perception using polymerizable ionic liquids. Finally, Truby will share the team’s recent efforts to advance the multiscale design and 3D printing of robotic materials. Altogether, these efforts advance a body-up, rather than compute-down, paradigm for robotics in which actuation, perception, and learning are materialized in the bodies of robots themselves.