Professor H. Harry Asada

Professor and Director of the Brit and Alex d’Arbeloff Laboratory for Information Systems and Technology

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Abstract: Biological systems are metaphors for robotics and the source of inspiration. From manipulation and locomotion to autonomy and emergent behaviors, robotics has been concerned with a rich variety of advanced functionality, all originated in biological inspiration. Roboticians abstract biological functionality, model and analyze it based on first principles, and build a machine that mimics that functionality. Robotics has been a vibrant research area for the last 50 years by assimilating new technologies and diverse disciplines. In parallel with the expansion of robotics, biology, too, has shown tremendous progress over the last 50 years. Molecular and cellular mechanisms, once treated totally as a black-box, are now better understood, and some of the mechanisms can be altered, and even guided towards our desired functionality. The rapid progress of engineering biological systems now allows us to use live cells and microbes as components of a machine. This technology is now having transformative impacts upon robotics; bio-integrated robotics aims to integrate live biological components into an advanced machine, which goes well beyond the paradigm of bio-mimetics.

In this talk, a brief history of bio-robotics will be presented in conjunction with the speaker’s personal history of robotics research. Starting with manipulation science in the 70s and 80s focusing on grasp stability, fixturing, and assembly, the speaker has been fascinated by human manipulative skills and biological functionality. He pursued muscle-like actuators, including direct-drive and cellular actuators, and most recently has arrived at bio-artificial muscles, i.e. actuators using live muscle cells. In his journey from bio-mimetics to bio-integrated robotics, the disciplinary foundation has been extended from Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics to cell biology, while the discipline of system dynamics and control has played the pivotal role in linking first principles to functional outcomes and synthesizing robotic machines. Bio-integrated robotics poses numerous challenges in analyzing and synthesizing bio-integrated systems, setting new frontiers of system dynamics and control. Recent works on modeling and control of myogenesis, angiogenesis, and molecular signaling processes exemplify the system dynamics and control challenges. Time delay and nonlinearity as well as emergent behaviors and complexity are critical issues in engineering bio-integrated robots. Such dynamics and control studies will contribute to better understanding behaviors of cells and microbes, from which novel designs and new functionality may be conceived for future robots.