Seminar: Passive Deformation Control Through Fiber Reinforcement in Biology and Engineered Structures

Dr. Mike Krieg
Assistant Professor
Department of Ocean & Resources Engineering
University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

Location Information
**This seminar will be held both in person (Watanabe Hall 112) and over Zoom**
Meeting ID: 961 6222 2366
Passcode: OREseminar
https://hawaii.zoom.us/j/96162222366

Recently the field of soft robotics has seen significant interest and expansion. Soft robotic systems can offer several advantages including a decreased risk of injury from human-robot interactions, especially for medical robots, decreased risk of critical failure from impacts or crashes, and an ability to perform much more complex interactions with fluid surroundings, to name a few. However, these deformable platforms also come with significant challenges. Not least of which is the question of how exactly to make a flexible structure deform into desirable patterns and avoid unwanted deformation, without imposing any forces externally. Here we can draw inspiration from biological systems that have evolved sophisticated structures without any rigid support, such as muscular hydrostats, where arrangements of muscles provide both the forces to drive motion as well as the support to maintain desired geometry. Classical examples include mammalian tongues, elephant trunks, and cephalopod tentacles.

In this talk we will investigate a less-known muscular hydrostat, the squid mantle, and how specific arrangements of collagen fiber networks allow squid to achieve the most successful swimming of all invertebrates. This talk will also introduce a general framework for modeling deformation of elastomeric sheets with different fiber reinforcement arrangements, which was inspired by squid mantle structures, and present experimental results demonstrating improved performance as it relates to soft robotics.