The Volkswagen Foundation is supporting two research projects at the University of Freiburg for three years each. One of them is the project “Creating Neurofluidics for Intelligent Soft Machines” of livMatS-member Prof. Dr. Edoardo Milana. For his project, Milana has been given a grant of 549 thousand euros. He is trying to integrate neuro-inspired fluidic circuits into soft robots.
When I wrote the draft description of the project I was inspired by new research in electronics, in which engineers are developing neuromorphic chips, meaning a computational architecture influenced by the structure of neural networks,” says Milana. He goes on to say, “My question is, ‘Can we create a neuromorphic circuit which uses fluids in place of electrons?’ Theoretically, that’s possible. You combine fluids technology with non-linear mechanics of soft materials in order to integrate multi-stable structures in fluidic networks.” For a long time, it seemed inconceivable, that robots could function without electricity. But ultimately, observing animals, microorganisms, and plants has changed the approach. Milana explains, “Imagine a soft robot with fluidic actuators controlled by an integrated neurofluidic network that’s composed of the same material as the robot and can be made with just a single pass of a 3D printer. We could develop a type of control for soft robots which perhaps might match the performance of biological organisms.”
For the research project “Creating Neurofluids for Intelligent Soft Machines” Milana and his team are building up on previous work done at IMTEK, the Department of Microsystems Engineering, and the Cluster of Excellence “Living, Adaption, and Energy-autonomous Materials Systems,” at the University of Freiburg. Prof. Dr. Thomas Speck and Dr. Falk Tauber recently presented soft robots which could be produced using a 3D printer. They were very robust and could work without electronics. Milana views his project as a further step towards developing an intelligent soft robot capable of moving effortlessly in the most varied of surroundings.
Since 2023, Milana has been a Tenure-Track Professor for Soft Machines at the Department of Microsystems Engineering of the University of Freiburg. He studied mechanical engineering and nanotechnology at the Sapienza University of Rome. While working on his doctorate at KU Leuven, he was already researching fluid control of soft robots. In 2019, he was a guest scientist at the University of Milan, and between 2020 and 2022, he conducted research at the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) in Bonn. Milana was selected for the Rising Stars Academy of the University of Freiburg in 2022. He received the stipend of the Walter Benjamin Programme of the German Research Foundation (DFG) in 2023.