How the movement of seeds inspired a series of wearable soft robots
It all started in Argentina. A country known for Tango, mate and monetary inflation. And yes, a few football players.There, in the frame of the international Masters program “Open Design” between the Universidad de Buenos Aires and the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany, the right people came together. They didn’t know it yet, but a few years later, Facundo Gutierrez and Juan Opitz-Silva would turn a crazy concept into a business idea, an idea José Villatoro and Nils Janßen would also come to fall in love with.
Facundo’s Masters thesis, supervised by Dr.-Ing. Khashayar Razghandi, was based on research carried out at the Max-Planck Institute for Colloids and Interfaces dealing with the movement and structure of plants. There, they studied how some plants (seed capsules, in this case) were able to open with changes in humidity without the need for any energy input: they were already dead. The science said, the movement comes from the way in which different layers are arranged within the microscopic structure of the plant. As fibers are oriented in different directions, the humidity makes them swell along these dissimilar orientations, creating bends and twists. This is the key element that governs the macroscopic behavior of the plant.
The resulting design question was how to use these bioinspired principles to make assistive technology more energy efficient. Indeed, Facundo had been working on active exoskeletons back in Argentina and, although he admired them, he also became aware of their shortcomings. His thesis and ensuing publication cover the design process and exploratory path that would serve as the preliminary groundwork for MotorSkins..
The focus of MotorSkins is on fabrics with embedded fluidics that can perform movement. In a similar way to plants, the movement of these fabric structures depends only on the arrangement of the different layers of materials and the design of the fluid circuits that they contain. It’s what is called a metamaterial. The second key point is that thanks to a clever design of the fluid circuit, the MotorSkins textiles can move without requiring an external battery or motor. It’s what we call hydrodynamic apparel: wearable soft robots that are powered only by the user’s own walk. We harvest the energy from each step, use it to perform movement and then release again, resetting the circuit.
This idea of bioinspiration, energy efficiency and assistive technology is what brought the team together. For Facundo, it was a natural continuation of his work. For Juan, it was the chance to empower people and break into a new field full of possibilities: how to bring solutions that were in the realm of science fiction into reality and make them accessible to everyone. For José, it was the chance to come back to his material science roots. While not directly involved himself, the study of plant movement and structure was an important topic in his graduate school, SALSA (yes, like the dance. No, he doesn’t know how to), which always interested him. For Nils, who had previously worked on the structure of microscopic animals and their feeding mechanisms, the chance and the means to explore, make and build soft robots inspired by nature was like a dream come true. This convergence of multidisciplinarity, curiosity and bioinspired design are what drives MotorSkins as a team.
Although the project started in academia, within what is now the Cluster of Excellence Matters of Activity, it was thanks to programs such as Singa Business Lab, DesignFarmBerlin and the Exist Gründerstipendium from the Federal Ministry for Economics Affairs and Energy (BMWi) that we obtained through Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin that the idea became a company, a prototype and a product. In this regard, Anastasia Zagorni and Prof. Carola Zwick were instrumental. We thank you for your support, as well as our network: MotionLab.berlin, the Innovation Network for Advanced Materials and Huge Thing×Google for Startups.
Looking forward to the future!
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