Workshop Description

Muscular hydrostats are biological structures lacking typical systems of skeletal support. A muscular hydrostat consists mainly of muscle tissues with smart arrangement, which enable it to perform various movements like bending, shortening, elongation, reaching and stiffness tuning while keeping constant volume during muscle contractions. Examples of muscular hydrostats include elephant trunks, octopus’ arms, cephalopod tentacles, reptile and mammal tongues. The underlying principles of muscular hydrostats make it an excellent model for integrating embodied intelligence into soft robotics. In muscular hydrostats, the arrangement and activation of muscle fibers provide insights for designing soft robots with high dexterity, strength, isovolumetric characteristics, and rapid responding to complex tasks and environments. Due to the compliance, such robots are less likely damaged from external environment and thus can be then applied in various fields such as the exploration, search and rescue, medicine, and more. Moreover, the muscular hydrostats offer a valuable blueprint for accurate modeling and control of the soft robotics which have infinite degrees of freedom in general configurations.

In this workshop, some significant issues focusing on the muscular hydrostats will be discussed. Topics of interest include the biological study of muscle arrangement in both marine and terrestrial animals and the muscular activation method in the octopus. These will open to new models of muscle biomechanics that can benefit the design of soft robotics. Mathematical models describing muscle activation and immersed boundary conditions will also be discussed. Special attention will be given to any advanced computational method emphasizing the comparisons to real-world creatures. In the context of robotics, the broad objective includes the applications of muscular hydrostats principles in the materials, design of robotics mechanism, modeling, and control, development of integrated prototypes and experimental validation with immersed boundary conditions.

Through this workshop, we aim to ask pressing and pertinent questions about the embodied intelligence which the animals so effortlessly exhibit and explore how this can be translated to more fruitful soft robotics applications. Then this workshop will provide a platform for presenting the latest computational and experimental design and modelling efforts which incorporate the underlying biology and physics of muscular hydrostats, with a first principles approach that fully accounts for the muscle activations and biomechanics of muscular hydrostats. At the same time soft robotic approaches to develop the continuum soft bodies will be discussed. The involvement of experts across domains will foster an interaction which can fuel a multi-pronged effort of modelling the embodied intelligence muscular hydrostats, especially focusing on exploratory tasks across different sectors. As soft robotics moves to incorporate and develop digital twins of physical designs, inputs from biologists and experimentalists will play a key role in improving the fidelity of such designs, something that we aim to achieve through this workshop as well.