MEMS Seminar: Carmel Majidi, "Soft-Matter Engineering for Robotics and Wearables"

Thomas Lord Dept. of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science welcomes Carmel Majidi, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, who will give the talk, "Soft-Matter Engineering for Robotics and Wearables."

Abstract: Progress in soft lithography and soft materials integration has led to extraordinary new classes of soft-matter sensors, circuits, and transducers. These material technologies are composed almost entirely out of soft matter - elastomers, gels, and conductive fluids like liquid metal - and represent the building blocks for machines and electronics that are soft, flexible, and stretchable. Because of their intrinsic compliance and elasticity, such devices can be incorporated into soft, biologically-inspired robots or be worn on the body and operate continuously without impairing natural body motion. In this talk, Majidi will review recent contributions from his research group in creating soft multifunctional materials for wearable electronics and soft robotics using these emerging practices in "soft-matter engineering" with a focus on soft robots powered using shape memory materials and soft material architectures for highly stretchable digital electronics, wearable energy harvesting, and electrically-responsive actuation. In addition to describing the synthesis and properties of these materials, Majidi will highlight several systems-level implementations that demonstrate their practical use in robotics, bioelectronics, and human-computer interaction.

BIO: CARMEL MAJIDI is the Clarence H. Adamson Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon, where he leads the Soft Machines Lab dedicated to the discovery of novel material architectures that allow machines and electronics to be soft, elastically deformable, and biomechanically compatible. Currently, his research is focused on modeling, design, and control of soft robotic systems as well as the developoment of multifunctional materials that exhibit unique combinations of mechanical, electrical, and thermal properties and can function as "artificial" skin, nervous tissue, and muscle. Majidi received his PhD in Electrical Engineering at UC Berkeley with postdoc appointments at Harvard & Princeton.