Bioinspired soft actuation
Joel Marthelot is a researcher at CNRS in Marseille, France. He holds a PhD in fracture mechanics from ESPCI, Paris. He was a Raman-Charpak fellow at TIFR, India, and a postdoc at MIT and Princeton University, where he worked on exploiting elastic and interfacial instabilities in soft structures for shape morphing. Since 2019, he is working at CNRS on actuation mechanisms in plants and insects. Alongside the mechanical description of these biological systems, he is working to transfer these actuation strategies to engineering at all scales, from deployable space structures to soft robots and medical devices.
Title: “Bioinspired soft actuation”
Abstract: Programming the motion of soft structures that expand, change shape, or react passively to external stimuli is a challenge for conventional engineering methods. Natural structures in the biological world are a source of inspiration, as they often present simple, resilient and reliable strategies for designing robust functions. Three examples will be presented: (1) hydraulic actuation of soft structures in the wing expansion of Drosophila melanogaster (2) the use of pneumatic actuation in extensible and inextensible soft robotic system (3) the use of plastic deformation in slender structure to program shape change. The main feature common to these different problems is the prominence of geometry, and its interplay with mechanics, to dictate complex mechanical behavior that is relevant and applicable over a wide range of length scales.