Could Robots Benefit From Having Silent Muscles?

My name is Robert Katzschmann, I am running the Soft Robotics Lab at ETH Zurich. My group is developing robots to explore the world above and underwater. We design robots to closely imitate nature and provide safer interactions with natural life – features that are hard to achieve with traditional, hard-bodied robotic systems. For example, our swimming robots can spy on marine life and serve as a platform for other researchers to track the impacts of climate change.

Earlier this year in April I had the chance to give a TED talk in Vancouver, Canada. This talk will be released this week for the public. To give you a little bit of background on why I am curious about building robots that better integrate with us and nature, I need to go back in time. When I was a child, my mother made me aware of the fact that much of the noise surrounding us stems from modern machines, which are just a recent invention from about 200 years ago.

If you open your window for some fresh air, you likely hear car engines, trains, air conditioning systems, and other machine noises. And there are places with even more noise pollution than just outside your window. Constant, unnatural loud machine noises are also a real problem for animals such as whales, who struggle to talk with each other. And we know that if a human is constantly exposed to noise, you can become stressed, depressed, and even develop tinnitus.

So, try to imagine living in a world without all the artificial noise produced by modern machines. Close your eyes for a moment and just focus on the sounds surrounding you. How would your day-to-day life in a busy city sound like? Instead of just the loud rattling of motors, the world would be filled with natural and human noises only. I personally would see this as a tremendous improvement for our quality of life.

New forms of transportation and robotic automation could improve the sound of our world while better preserving nature. I focus in my research on the idea of rethinking how we make intelligent machines by using muscles instead of motors. Most machines, and particularly robots, are made of rigid metals and plastics, and use rotating motors or fast spinning propellers. But there are no rotating motors in nature. Nature uses muscles to smoothly wiggle, walk or run. Muscles combined with soft materials are adaptive and safe to use in our everyday life. Machines made of contracting muscles could become sustainable, nature preserving, and less noisy than what we have today.

With my research lab at D-MAVT, ETH Zurich, I create new generations of robots that have silent artificial muscles. These muscles directly transform electrical energy into contractions. Imagine a submarine that has no more propeller but swims by moving its deformable tail from side to side, just like a real fish. That’s what we do. We have even started to print, grow and control real muscles just out of living cells. We follow approaches that do not require to kill animals to obtain their cells, but instead we make use of self-replicating cell-lines to grow muscles in a petri dish. These grown muscles are derived from natural resources only which makes them a great candidate for sustainable biomimetic machines that decrease emissions and pollution.

We need to rethink what machines should do and should not do. They should safely integrate with us, improve our quality of life, respect the environment, and stop polluting our world with noise.

If you would like to learn more, check out my talk at TED2022:

About the Author

My recommended resources/reading list:
1) New York Times Article on how Robotic Fish Keep a Fishy Eye on the Health of the Ocean:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/21/science/robot-fish.html
2) Exploration of underwater life with an acoustically controlled soft robotic fish:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.aar3449
3) Dynamic task space control enables soft manipulators to perform real-world tasks:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/aisy.202200024
4) Tethered multimaterial soft swimmers driven by electrostatic muscles:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.00731
5) HASEL Artificial Muscles for a New Generation of Lifelike Robots—Recent Progress and Future Opportunities:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/adma.202003375
6) A differentiable computational design pipeline for soft underwater swimmers with shape interpolation:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3450626.3459832
7) Biohybrid robot powered by an antagonistic pair of skeletal muscle tissues:
https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/scirobotics.aat4440
8) Will microfluidics enable functionally integrated biohybrid robots?
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2200741119

Call to action:
1) Learn about the latest developments on robots with muscles by visiting the Soft Robotics Lab at ETH Zurich:
https://srl.ethz.ch
2) Watch latest videos by the Soft Robotics Lab at ETH Zurich:
https://www.youtube.com/@softrobotics
3) Follow the Soft Robotics Lab at ETH Zurich on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/srl-ethz
4) Follow the Soft Robotics Lab at ETH Zurich on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/srl_ethz