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Soft robotics, an emerging field, focuses on creating flexible and adaptable robots inspired by the pliability found in living organisms. Developed through advancements in materials and manufacturing techniques, soft robots offer unique capabilities such as delicate object manipulation and safe human interaction. In soft robot design, the greatest challenge currently lies in identifying a structure capable of executing a targeted maneuver considering its intricate mechanical behavior. A possible design concept is to learn from biological systems and transfer the functionalities to biomimetic technologies. Recent advancements in soft robotics have turned to plants as inspiration, because they offer attractive characteristics such as resilience, self-healing, autonomy and continuous mechanisms. Hereby, the underlying biological cells act as a microstructure enabling a motion of the macrostructure and introducing intelligence into the system. Yet, before a biological function principle can be transferred to a biomimetic device, it must be fully understood. High-fidelity computer simulations are particularly suitable for analyzing biological motions within a so-called reverse biomimetics approach, but also for technical mechanisms. In this context, computational mechanics can be seen as an enabling technology, allowing for the representation of soft robots as the continuous and flexible structures they truly are. This talk aims to showcase my recent research efforts to integrate the two fields of computational mechanics and soft robotics deeply. Above all, my vision is to go even one step further and not only “reconstruct” the mechanical behavior of biomimetic soft robots through computational analysis, but also to advance methods in computational mechanics such that a systematic inverse design of these complex structures comes within reach.
Dr.-Ing. Renate Sachse (Technische Universität München)
Renate Sachse studied Civil Engineering at the University of Stuttgart, where she also obtained her PhD under the supervision of Prof. Manfred Bischoff at the Institute for Structural Mechanics. During her doctoral studies, she was involved in an interdisciplinary network together with architects and biologists to advance biomimetic technologies in architecture, but at the same time she worked in the field of computational mechanics to develop novel methods for the design and analysis of complex nonlinear structures. Renate received multiple awards for her dissertation, such as the Award of the Friends of the University of Stuttgart and the Bertha Benz Prize 2022, which honors pioneering spirit, courage and visionary character. As a postdoc at the Technical University of Munich, she is currently a fellow of the Klaus Tschira Boost Fund for excellent young researchers with her project on bio-inspired soft robotics. In this role she has spent several months at the Bertoldi Lab at Harvard University. Besides her research and teaching activities, Renate is engaged in the scientific community and committed to promoting the cause of young researchers – from the perspective of a young researcher herself. She was appointed as GAMM Junior (young section of the Association of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics) and was actively involved in organizing events and fostering networks for young researchers. She now acts as the representative of the German Association for Computational Mechanics (GACM) within the Young Investigators Committee of the European Community on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences (ECCOMAS).