Designing New Materials for Robotics

Ryan Truby is inspired by the performance gap between biological and artificial machines. As an assistant professor of materials science and engineering and mechanical engineering at Northwestern University, Truby leads the Robotic Matter Lab, where he and his team explore how materials can improve machine intelligence.

Truby recently discussed the work being done at the Robotic Matter Lab, why materials design is important to robotics, and what he admires most about Northwestern Engineering's Master of Science in Robotics (MSR) program.

What is the goal of the Robotic Matter Lab?

As a group that sits between robotics and materials sciences and engineering, we're looking to improve machine intelligence through material design. We're interested in why robots do so poorly from an autonomy point of view compared to living organisms. We know the material nature of living organisms has a role to play, so we're trying to extract some material lessons out of living organisms, use them in new materials that we can design, and then bring them to robots to make them a bit more biomimetic in their behaviors and capabilities.  

What's an example of a living organism material you're focused on?

We are very inspired by muscle more than any one organism. This might sound trivial, but there's a reason why organisms ranging from the tiny tardigrade to blue whales use the same type of actuator — muscles work really well. As engineers, one of the greatest challenges we face is high-performance actuator design, much less designing artificial muscles that perform like biological ones. My team and I right now are focused on new materials and designs for artificial muscles that are higher performing, more energy efficient, and take those lessons from biology and bring them meaningfully to robotics. If we could engineer new materials that allow us to efficiently control something muscle-like, that would put us on a path to embrace some of the soft mechanical behaviors we see in the bodies of living organisms and to investigate how we might meaningfully use such materials to tackle key problems in soft and bio-inspired robotics.  

What do you see as the biggest problem with materials and robotics?

If you look at robots right now, most are based on motorized and sparsely sensorized mechanisms. However, nature doesn't build with mechanisms; nature builds with materials. One of the big lessons from biology is that your body plays such a critical role in your general autonomy and intelligence. If you pick up your cell phone off the table, you're not perfectly calculating that maneuver. You just move your hand into the table, sense once you've made contact, and then instinctually close your hand to pick the phone up. You don't even realize you're doing all that. A robot has to perfectly execute each of those things algorithmically, and there's something lost in that lack of the body participating in intelligence. Bringing this type of physical intelligence to robotics through new materials is at the very heart of all that we're trying to do. 

How do you think the MSR program prepares students to excel in careers that leverage robotics?

Robotics is a highly collaborative field, so one of the key strengths of MSR is the cohort model. By emphasizing the cohort, MSR is preparing you to be on a team working in some robotics context. Robotics is not sitting behind your computer and programming; it's a marriage of software and hardware coming together and working with people focused on both sides of the system. One of the other great things about MSR is there is an emphasis on doing, an emphasis on physically realizing all that you're learning in actual robots. At the end of the day, that's what robotics is all about. 

Is there anything else you'd like to add?

I admire programs and organizations that manage to build a robust sense of community. It's hard to build that, and more importantly, it's hard to maintain that. MSR is a great example from an educational perspective of how to have a sense of community alongside your education. You won't go to another university and find this cohort model — you would be by yourself doing your own thing. That's the strength of MSR. You're brought into a community that you're a part of for your entire time in the program.