Department Seminar Of David Zarrouk- Design of High Performance Minimally Actuated Robots
Design of High Performance Minimally Actuated Robots
Monday June 16th 2025 at 14:00
Wolfson Building of Mechanical Engineering , Room 206
Abstract:
From delicate medical procedures to hazardous environment exploration, bio-inspired robots are transforming fields like medicine, search and rescue, maintenance, and security.
Our lab builds versatile bio-inspired robots for medicine, exploration, and environmental tasks. We often draw inspiration from nature's ingenuity but with a minimalist approach. Unlike animals' intricate musculature, our robots achieve impressive capabilities with a small number of motors, leading to innovative designs that can crawl, drive, and fly across diverse environments. From reconfigurable robots that adapt to challenging surfaces to wave-like swimmers, these robotic designs showcase the power of combining biological inspiration with efficient design.
In this talk, we will present the impact of minimalistic actuation on enhancing performance in robotics and explore new actuation concepts that hold the potential to address specific challenges. By reducing the number of actuators and incorporating minimalist approaches, we can reduce the weight and size, improve energy efficiency, and enhance the robots' overall mobility and maneuverability. During the talk, we will showcase a variety of examples of robots that we designed in the last years. (The talk will discuss methods and concepts but will not include analytical models).
Bio:
David Zarrouk is an Associate Professor at the Mechanical Engineering department of Ben Gurion University of the Negev and director of the “Bio-inspired and Medical Robotics” Laboratory. He received his M.Sc. in 2007 (in stochastic mechanics) and Ph.D. in 2011 (in medical robotics) from the faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the Technion. Between Aug. 2011 and Sep. 2013, he was a Fulbright postdoctoral scholar at the EECS Dep. of U.C. Berkeley, working on miniature crawling robots. His research interests are in robotic design, bio-inspired and miniature robotics, flexible and slippery robot-to-surface interaction, space robotics, minimally actuated mechanisms, and medical devices. Prof. Zarrouk received multiple prizes in teaching, research, and innovation.
