Swarthmore College Department of Computer Science

Talk by John Rieffel, Tufts University

Mechanisms as Minds: What Caterpillars and Camping Tents Can Teach Us About Soft Robotics
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
4:15 pm in the main cs lab, Room 240

Abstract: Traditional engineering approaches strive to avoid, or actively suppress, nonlinear dynamic coupling among components. Biological systems, by contrast, are often rife with these dynamics. Could there be, in some cases, a benefit to high degrees of dynamical coupling? I will several examples of mechanical systems which, paradoxically, may increase dynamical complexity to reduce control complexity. In these situations, mechanisms act as minds, and bodies become data buses. This principle of "Mechanism as Mind" presents a new paradigm for the decentralized control of large, coupled, modular systems, and lends further credence to notions of embodied anatomical computation in biological systems. This is of particular interest when studying the biomechanics of completely soft animals such as caterpillars, and in the nascent field of soft robotics.

John Rieffel is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Biomimetic Devices Laboratory at Tufts University, where he studies soft robotics and caterpillar biomechanics. Prior to that, he was a Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell University in the Computational Synthesis Laboratory, where he explored tensegrity robotics. He majored in Engineering (B.S.) and Computer Science (B.A.) at Swarthmore College, and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Brandeis University.