Worm-inspired machines

The quest for soft compliant machines able to safely operate in unstructured environments and to perform tasks in response to stimuli is increasingly demanded, in many applications and across different scales. To achieve this goal, significant research efforts in soft robotics and material science have been directed at the development of novel synthetic machines inspired by living beings. In this context, understanding how worms can burrow into sediments, anchor to holes, and explore the surrounding by protruding and elongating body parts appears a really intriguing source of biological inspiration to design new soft robots.
This workshop aims at exploring scientific advances and translation challenges in worm-inspired robotics. An open discussion addressing a broad spectrum of aspects will be provided by bringing together internationally renowned experts coming from different fields. Indeed, interdisciplinarity will be a core feature of the workshop, where scientists and researchers in biology, biomedicine, materials science, math, informatics and robotics will have the possibility to share ideas and advances in worm-inspired technological solutions. The attendees of this workshop will take home a future-oriented perspective on research and applications in this field.

Motivation

Living Machines is one of the main international conferences dealing with the understanding and harnessing of the principles underlying living systems. This workshop addresses the frontier of bioinspired robotic systems with a focus on worms as biological inspiration source. This workshop aims at bringing together a heterogeneous community of roboticists, material scientists, physicists, computer scientists, and biologists, in line with the Living Machine mission of gathering internationally renowned scientists and researchers and main enterprises to share ideas and advances in the bioinspired robotics field.
This workshop addresses at the research on novel worms-like technologies inspired by the scientific investigation of biological systems.

Program

This workshop is supported by the Project MAPWORMS - Mimicking Adaptation and Plasticity in WORMS