Robots with Muscles: Utilizing Organic Materials for Sustainable Robot Creations - Victoria Webster-Wood, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Founder of the Biohybrid and Organic Robotics Group at Carnegie Mellon University

Finding Genius Podcast

Richard Jacobs

Medicine, Health & Fitness

4.4 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 17 August 2019

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Animals have long been sources of inspiration for robotics and engineering. Their unique features, behaviors, and ways of moving are frequently mimicked and replicated; one lab at CMU is incorporating a fundamental animal feature into their nontraditional robot design: muscle and neurologic tissue.

Victoria Webster-Wood, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and leader of the Biohybrid and Organic Robotics Group (B.O.R.G), joins us to discuss her research in developing biohybrid and organic robots. In this episode, you will hear about Webster-Wood's current research and how her team is integrating muscular and neurologic tissue into these robots of the future. If successful, this research could produce completely organic and programmable robots that would be able to exist in the natural world unlike any other robot today; with applications in environmental disaster response and prevention, search and rescue, and biomedical research, the future is very exciting for this technology.

For more information, please visit www.engineering.cmu.edu/borg.

Transcript

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0:58.0	Thank you. Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with the Future Tech and Future Tech
1:08.0	Health Podcast. I have Victoria Webster Wood, she's an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, also with a courtesy appointment in biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.
1:19.0	And her research is interesting, so I'll let her describe it, but Vicky first, thanks for coming to the podcast. How you doing?
1:25.0	Hi Richard, thanks for having me. I'm doing well.
1:27.0	Yeah, it looks like you're working on the integration of organic material into robots essentially making I guess a cyborg-esque type of arrangement but how would you describe it what do you what are you working on?
1:39.6	Yeah, so my lab is the bio-hybrid and organic robotics group here at Carnegie Mellon and what we're really doing is we're trying to create an engineering science for the use of renewable organic materials in robotics and other
1:55.8	technology platforms. And we're really driven by this fundamental question of
	...

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