Analysis of self-adaptive and self-organisational molecular motor units to inform the construction of scalable biomimetic soft-robotic modules.

Self-adaptive and self-organising force inducing fibres are found in human cells, in structures such as the cilia of a respiratory endothelial cell, the flagellum of a spermatozoon or within the sarcomere of muscle cells. These have no neurological input, merely being an arrangement of microtubules within a fibrous sheath, and as such must perform these control mechanisms intrinsically, however the process by which this occurs is largely unknown. This is particularly impressive in the case of the spermatozoon flagellum, which at 0.4-0.5 microns in diameter is the smallest spontaneous force generating system capable of achieving biological function.
A deeper knowledge of the mechanisms at play within these cells could have a hugely beneficial impact on the field of robotics if they could be recreated - knowing how much power to apply for a task with unknown force parameters is a computationally complex problem within robotics. Artificial muscle fibres containing an intrinsic feedback mechanism would be able to perform more complex behaviour unsupervised and provide a huge versatility in scale - molecular motors within the body drive motion at the micro scale and can self-organise into far larger macro scale structures.

Multiple theories exist on the causes of spontaneous oscillations, organisation and adaptation but are difficult to verify or refute - the aim of this project will be to recreate these mechanisms artificially in a laboratory setting by constructing analogous biomimetic macroscale soft robotics models of the molecular active units in order to analyse and better understand said mechanisms. If an appropriate model is created, the aim will shift toward its utilisation in creating larger scale robots capable of performing simple tasks (such as swimming via travelling waves) with little or no computational input. Focus will be put on making the models non-prescriptive - individual motor units should be either oscillatory or uni-directional, with organisations into more complex movements purely a factor of the architecture of the model.

Trying to understand and take advantage of microscopic problems using macroscopic parallels is an under-developed field and this presents an opportunity to bring together molecular dynamics and soft robotics in a truly novel and holistic way. If this project is successful, it could have a broad impact on the field of robotics. Reducing the computational power required for feedback in robots that perform delicate tasks would allow either space to be freed up for other processes, meaning smarter robots, or allowing a reduction in the size of the processing hardware needed, meaning smaller and more efficient robots as some computational processes could be encoded morphologically.

This research will be performed in collaboration with 'SoftLab Bristol' at the British Robotics Laboratory.

This project falls within the EPSRC 'Engineering' research area, particularly the topics of Control engineering and Robotics.