GSaME-Colloquium: "Artificial Muscles for the Lifelike Robots of the Future” by Prof. Christoph Keplinger (Director Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems)

Abstract - Robots today rely on rigid components and electric motors, making them heavy, unsafe near humans, expensive, and ill-suited for unpredictable environments. Nature, in contrast, uses soft materials like muscle and skin, and has produced organisms that drastically outperform robots in terms of agility, dexterity, and adaptability. To create a new generation of lifelike robots that match the vast capabilities of biological systems, we need to develop actuators that replicate the astonishing all-around actuation performance of muscle. Hydraulically Amplified Self-healing ELectrostatic (HASEL) transducers are a new class of self-sensing, high-performance muscle-mimetic actuators, which are electrically driven and match or exceed most performance metrics of biological muscle; modeling results reveal rich underlying materials science to be further explored, and they lay out a roadmap towards HASELs with drastically improved performance, far surpassing both biological muscle and traditional electromagnetic motors. This talk gives an overview of the latest research results and commercialization efforts.

Speaker: Prof. Dr. Christoph Keplinger - Christoph Keplinger is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS) in Stuttgart, Germany, where he heads the Robotic Materials Department. He also holds an honorary professor appointment at the University of Stuttgart, and additionally, he is an Eminent Visiting Professor of Soft Robotics at the University of Colorado Boulder, USA. Before joining the Max Planck Society in 2020, he was an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and a Fellow of the Materials Science and Engineering Program at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he also held an endowed appointment serving as Mollenkopf Faculty Fellow.

Building upon his background in soft matter physics (PhD, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria), mechanics and chemistry (Postdoc, Harvard University, USA), he leads a highly interdisciplinary research group at MPI-IS, with a current focus on (I) soft robotics, (II) energy capture and (III) functional polymers. His work has been published in top journals including in Science and Nature, as well as highlighted in popular outlets such as National Geographic and on TED.com. He has received prestigious awards including a 2017 Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering, a 2021 Alexander von Humboldt Professorship (declined), and the 2013 EAPromising European Researcher Award from the European Scientific Network for Artificial Muscles. He is the principal inventor of HASEL artificial muscles, a new technology that will help enable a new generation of lifelike robotic hardware; in 2018 he co-founded Artimus Robotics to commercialize the HASEL technology, and has served as Chief Science Officer (CSO) of Artimus since its founding.