Materializing Intelligence: Robotic Materials for Real-World Robots

Speaker

Ryan L. Truby

• June and Donald Brewer Junior Professor, Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Northwestern University

About This Talk

Robots still lag far behind living organisms in efficiency, adaptability, and resilience. Most are built from rigid, motorized mechanisms and lean on ever more computationally intensive perception, control, and learning pipelines to cope with the real world. Animals, by contrast, derive these capabilities directly from their material composition and morphology. For example, muscles provide compliant, back-drivable actuation; event-based mechanoreceptors translate body-environment interactions into rich feedback; and multiscale tissue architectures impart toughness and graceful degradation. Northwestern University’s Ryan Truby, along with his research group, the Robotic Matter Lab, develops robotic materials, or material systems that empower robots to operate, learn, and adapt in real-world environments as animals do.
 
In this talk, Truby will show how the team establishes performance-through-processing relationships to inversely design robotic materials for new actuation and sensing capabilities, while advancing digital design and additive manufacturing platforms that reveal new structure-property relationships in soft, architected, and structural robotic materials. He will present the team’s work in architecting elastomers from structural to molecular scales as artificial muscles; then introduce efforts to create iontronic materials for robot perception using polymerizable ionic liquids. Finally, Truby will share the team’s recent efforts to advance the multiscale design and 3D printing of robotic materials. Altogether, these efforts advance a body-up, rather than compute-down, paradigm for robotics in which actuation, perception, and learning are materialized in the bodies of robots themselves.

About the Speaker

Ryan Truby is the June and Donald Brewer Junior Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University, where he directs the Robotic Matter Lab. His research aims to advance machine intelligence through materials design. Since launching the Robotic Matter Lab in 2021, he and his team have pioneered architected elastomers as motorized artificial muscles, polymerizable ionic liquids for 3D-printed soft iontronics, and new 3D printing methods for robotic materials.

Before Northwestern, Ryan was a postdoctoral associate at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory with Professor Daniela Rus. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Harvard University with Professor Jennifer Lewis. He is the recipient of a DARPA Director’s Fellowship, DARPA Young Faculty Award, Office of Naval Research and Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Awards, the Outstanding Paper Award at the 2019 IEEE International Conference on Soft Robotics, and an inaugural Schmidt Science Fellowship in 2018. He was named to ASME’s Mechanical Engineering Watch List in 2026 and an ASME Rising Star of Mechanical Engineering in 2024.

About the MSE Seminar Series

The Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) Seminar Series features distinguished speakers from leading institutions, offering a platform for sharing groundbreaking research, innovative ideas, and entrepreneurial experiences. Held multiple times each semester, these seminars bring global perspectives world to MIT’s materials research community, exposing students, faculty, and postdocs to cutting-edge concepts and valuable networking opportunities.