Project description
Smart materials for soft robots
There is an increasing demand for trained researchers that investigate smart materials, which can be used to build new generations of intelligent soft robots. In response, the EU-funded SMART project offers multidisciplinary training to young researchers in both soft robotics and smart materials. The project will exploit smart, stimuli-responsive materials in intelligent soft devices, developing systems that can adapt to and safely interact with dynamic environments. Integrating smart stimuli-responsive materials will lead to embedded sensing and actuation properties for advanced control, structural health monitoring, self-regulation and self-assembly. Using self-healing materials, soft robots will be constructed that can autonomously heal damages. Combining capabilities of smart material with embodied intelligence, sensing and advanced control, the lifetime of soft robots can be drastically increased.
Objective
The SMART Innovative Training Network is a joint venture between academia and industry, providing scientific and personal development of young researchers in the multidisciplinary fields of soft robotics and smart materials. SMART will realize the technologically and scientifically ambitious breakthroughs to exploit smart, stimuli-responsive material systems with actuation, sensing and self-healing capabilities for intelligent soft devices. This allows the soft robots to interact with dynamic and unknown environments in a smart fashion to avert catastrophic failure and reestablish structural integrity and operational functionality. Control intelligence enables interaction with the outer world and structural health monitoring allows the establishment of autonomous healing procedures, where upon sensing of damage or loss of functionality the system will cease operation and start a repair action, followed by the evaluation of the effective recovery of functionality and finally return to operation, thus expanding the service lifetime. These technologies will be integrated in fully functional and autonomous demonstrators to disseminate, benchmark and exploit the results. There is a need for future leaders with excellence in smart material systems and technologically advanced applications such as robotics and automation. The SMART ITN offers such multidisciplinary training by combining these two emerging fields with meaningful societal and economic impact (T-model). For this purpose, SMART brings together 8 beneficiaries and 11 partner organizations including 2 research institutes and 12 private companies, belonging to 7 EU member states, and to 2 associated states (Switzerland, Turkey). The consortium’s complementarity and multidisciplinarity will enable a top-level educational programme, with special focus on spanning TRL levels from innovative fundamentally new concepts to system prototypes and teaching them in an RRI spirit.
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Coordinator
1050 Bruxelles / Brussel
Belgium