2025 MRS Fall Meeting & Exhibit

Symposium SF05-From Robotic Toward Autonomous Materials

Soft robotics has made tremendous strides over recent years, with new forms of soft structures, actuators, sensors, and control strategies paving the way for physical intelligence. However, the field still faces challenges in power, performance, and control due to limited material availability. To overcome these limitations, researchers are turning to nature for inspiration. Multifunctionality is the key to building emergent embodied and distributed energy as well as autonomy and control in materials, and is poised to significantly impact theory, innovations, and applications in the field. Autonomous behavior that can integrate distributed actuation, perception, control, and energy capabilities in robotic agents is required. This requires new material design paradigms that can tightly integrate multiple robotic capabilities to create functional materials that can perform tasks without human intervention. The symposium aims to bring together experts from materials science, soft robotics, chemistry, and mechanics to achieve this interdisciplinary vision. By collaborating across these fields, researchers can build beyond the current visions of robotic materials and create truly autonomous ones. The potential applications of this technology are vast, from soft robots that can perform delicate surgical procedures to autonomous systems that can monitor and repair infrastructure. As the field continues to advance, we can expect to see more innovative solutions that push the boundaries of what is possible with soft robotics.
This innovative approach provides research opportunities where both theory and experiments can produce discoveries and potential applications in Material Science and Engineering, such as self-cleaning and functionalized actuators for AR, VR XR applications, environmentally adaptive surfaces, enduring and agile robots, responsive surfaces to communicate biological markers, situation adaptive protective gear and more.

Topics will include:

  • Materials with distributed sensorimotor behaviors
  • Soft material logic, memory, and computation
  • Stimuli-responsive hydrogels, liquid crystalline materials, and composites
  • Multifunctional materials for programmed shape-change, adaptability, and embodied intelligence
  • Application- and data-driven design of robotic and autonomous materials
  • Architected materials for robots
  • Additive and digital fabrication of autonomous materials
  • Modeling, simulation, and control of autonomous materials
  • Autonomous soft, bioinspired, and/or microscale robots
  • Self-healing, self-regulatory, and homeostatic materials
  • Biohybrid, autonomous materials
  • Materials for energy scavenging and embodied energy

Invited Speakers:

  • Keith A. Brown (Boston University, USA)
  • Tommy Angelini (University of Florida, USA)
  • Bilge Baytekin (Bilkent University, Turkey)
  • Phil Buskohl (Air Force Research Laboratory, USA)
  • Kyu-Jin Cho (Seoul National University, Republic of Korea)
  • Alfred J. Crosby (University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA)
  • Amir D. Gat (Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, USA)
  • Michael Dickey (North Carolina State University, USA)
  • Kris Dorsey (Northeastern University, USA)
  • Francesco Greco (Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy)
  • Amir H. Alavi (University of Pittsburgh, USA)
  • James H. Pikul (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA)
  • Ryan Hayward (University of Colorado Boulder, USA)
  • Daniel I.Goldman (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA)
  • Alexandra Ion (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
  • Timothy J. White (University of Colorado Boulder, USA)
  • Hughes Josie (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland)
  • Mirko Kovac (Imperial College London, United Kingdom)
  • Shlomo Magdassi (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel)
  • Shingo Meada (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan)
  • Shingo Meada (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan)
  • Ankur Mehta (University of California, Los Angeles, USA)
  • Monica Olvera De La Cruz (Northwestern University, USA)
  • Markus P. Nemitz (Tufts University, USA)
  • Jang-Ung Park (Yonsei University, Republic of Korea)
  • Abdon Pena-Francesch (University of Michigan, USA)
  • Kirstin Petersen (Cornell University, USA)
  • Jordan Raney (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
  • Sheila Russo (Boston University, USA)
  • Herbert Shea (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland)
  • Nancy Sottos (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)
  • Jeong-Yun Sun (Seoul National University, Republic of Korea)
  • David Swanson (Mobility at U.S. Air Force, USA)
  • Zeynep Temel (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
  • Renee Zhao (Stanford University, USA)
  • Xuanhe Zhao (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)

Symposium Organizers

Robert Shepherd
Cornell University
Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.
USA

Simona Aracri
Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, CNR, Istituto di Ingegneria del Mare
Italy

Yoav Matia
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Department of Mechanical Engineering.
Israel

Ryan Truby
Northwestern University
Department of Materials Science and Engineering.
USA

Topics

actuation adaptive autonomous bioelectronic electronic material energetic material fluidics functional robotics structural