Vision Statement: Interactive Materials—Drivers of Future Robotic Systems

Abstract

A robot senses its environment, processes the sensory information, acts in response to these inputs, and possibly communicates with the outside world. Robots generally achieve these tasks with electronics-based hardware or by receiving inputs from some external hardware. In contrast, simple microorganisms can autonomously perceive, act, and communicate via purely physicochemical processes in soft material systems. A key property of biological systems is that they are built from energy-consuming "active" units. Exciting developments in material science show that even very simple artificial active building blocks can show surprisingly rich emergent behaviors. Active nonequilibrium systems are therefore predicted to play an essential role in realizing interactive materials. A major challenge is to find robust ways to couple and integrate the energy-consuming building blocks to the mechanical structure of the material. However, success in this endeavor will lead to a new generation of sophisticated micro and soft-robotic systems that can operate autonomously.