Nov 19, 2026

Chemical Signaling and Motion for Soft Robots

Date: November 19, 2026 | 10:30 am – 12:15 pm
Speaker: Michael M. Lerch, University of Groningen
Location: Office Bldg West / Ground floor / Heinzel Seminar Room (I21.EG.101)
Language: English

Current robotic technologies, despite advances in AI, are inherently limited by the underlying hard materials. To make robots useful for co-work, medical interventions, and care, future robot bodies need to be soft, which requires new approaches on how to control their motions and coordinate their operations. Stimuli-responsive materials are at the heart of a materials revolution in robotics and recent advances in chemical feedback control have enabled ever more complex material behaviors. In this lecture, I will present some of our work on chemically-driven actuators and intelligent materials. Specifically, I will discuss how molecular design and chemical reaction networks enable unexpected behaviors and how these can be harnessed for macroscale motions.