Body-Brain Co-intelligent in Soft Robotics

Date: 2026/01/27 – 2026/01/27

Academic Seminar: Body-Brain Co-intelligent in Soft Robotics

Speaker: Jue Wang, Postdoctoral Associate in Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science at Yale University

Time: 9:00 -10:00 a.m., January 27, 2026 (Beijing Time)

Location: Online

Abstract

Soft and shape-morphing robots can physically adapt to uncertain, unstructured environments, but reliable performance requires closing the loop between morphology (“body”) and decision-making (“brain”). This talk begins with prior work on body intelligence, where shape is treated as a programmable, high-dimensional resource. Learning-enabled control and inverse design methods for complex shape-morphing devices will be presented, enabling precise and real-time specification of target geometries and deformation fields, along with bioengineering translations such as bioreactor and cell-stretching platforms that deliver customizable, spatially uniform, time-varying mechanical stimuli.

The talk then turns to brain intelligence for soft robots, introducing an efficient RL/sim2real pipeline based on surrogate compliance modeling. By embedding soft-body effects into tractable simulation, reinforcement learning can discover locomotion strategies that improve agility, robustness, and energy efficiency. Experimental results on a shape-morphing amphibious robotic turtle will illustrate robust locomotion across diverse environments via learned gait and morphology transitions.

Finally, these directions are unified into a Body–Brain Co-Intelligence framework, combining rich morphing capability with multimodal sensing (shape, environment, energy, contact) and data fusion to determine when and how to morph. The talk concludes with a roadmap toward morphology-aware perception, decision-making under uncertainty, and closed-loop co-optimization of hardware and learning for reliable operation across land, water, and transitional terrains.

Biography

Jue Wang is a Postdoctoral Associate in Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science at Yale University in Prof. Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio’s group. He earned his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Purdue University (advisor: Prof. Alex Chortos), following M.S. studies at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and a B.S. from Dalian University of Technology. His research spans soft robotics, machine learning, bioreactor, 3D print, flexible electronics, parallel mechanisms, etc. These works have been published in high-impact journals such as Nat. Rev. Mater., Sci. Adv., Nat. Commun., etc, with recent postdoctoral work under review at Sci. Robot.  and submitted to Nat. Mach. Intell..