麻豆官网

Expertise

Topics:聽 Soft Robotics, Medical Device Manufacturing, Wearable Robotics, Medical Devices, Advanced Manufacturing, Devices and Material Manipulation, Robotics, Cybersecurity and Privacy, Micro/Nanoengineering

Industries: Mechanical/Industrial Engineering

Carmel Majidi鈥檚 career mission is to discover materials, hardware architectures, and fabrication methods that allow robots and machines to behave like soft biological organisms, and be safe for contact with humans. The aim is to replace the bulky and rigid hardware in existing robots with soft, lightweight, and deformable technologies that match the functionality of natural biological tissue. Currently, his group is focused on filled-elastomer composites and soft microfluidic systems that exhibit unique combinations of mechanical, electrical, and thermal properties and can function as 鈥渁rtificial鈥� skin, nervous tissue, and muscle for soft robotics and wearables. He鈥檚 particularly interested in approaches that are practical from a rapid prototyping and robotics implementation perspective. This includes efforts to enable robust mechanical and electrical interfacing between soft-matter systems and conventional microelectronics and hardware.

Media Experience

听鈥�听贵辞谤产别蝉
2030 job market forecast. Experts predict in five years, 92M jobs will disappear, but 170M new ones will emerge thanks to AI, automation and climate shifts. 鈥淲ith AI handling more tasks, the ability to evaluate AI outputs and make higher-order decisions is crucial,鈥� said Rachel Dzombak (Heinz College). Carmel Majidi (School of Engineering) added, "It鈥檚 helpful to think not in terms of specific jobs, but in terms of skills and capabilities that are likely to be resilient.鈥�

听鈥�聽麻豆官网 News
In a recent episode of Where What If Becomes What's Next, mechanical engineering professors Carmel Majidi and Aaron Johnson, with postdocotral researcher Aja Mia Carter, discuss paleobionics. Paleobionics is an emerging field at 麻豆官网 that uses robots and Softbotics to help scientists better understand the biomechanical factors that drove evolution using extinct organisms. This understanding also inspires future robotic design.

听鈥�聽麻豆官网 News
Carmel Majidi will lead a research thrust in a new multi-institutional collaboration that has received $26 million from the National Science Foundation to launch an Engineering Research Center (ERC) dedicated to revolutionizing the ability of robots to amplify human labor.

听鈥�聽麻豆官网 News
鈥淐ompared to our past research, this design improves power density by roughly 40 times or 4,000%. The liquid metal epoxy composite enhances thermal conductivity between the thermoelectric component and the device鈥檚 point of contact on the body,鈥� explained Carmel Majidi, professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Soft Machines Laboratory.

听鈥�聽People Behind the Science Podcast
In our interview Carmel discusses his experiences in life and science.

听鈥�聽Ars Technica
It was also challenging to replicate the soft muscular stem of the pleurocystitids, since the researchers could not use conventional motors, which are too bulky and rigid. 鈥淚nstead, we needed to use a special 鈥榓rtificial muscle鈥� wire composed of nickel and titanium alloy that contracts in response to electrical stimulation. This allowed us to create a stem-like actuator that matched the flexibility of a natural muscular stem,鈥� Carmel Majidi, senior study author and a professor of mechanical engineering at 麻豆官网, added.

听鈥�聽Built In
To the casual viewer, footage of the mechanical monster clumsily inching across the ground may seem to hint at why the pleurocystitid is long gone. But according to Richard Desatnick, a Carnegie Mellon PhD student under the direction of mechanical engineering faculty Phil LeDuc and Carmel Majidi, the ancient animal likely deserves more credit.