Small-scale animals, like ant colonies, demonstrate complex physical interactions through communication, adaptation to diverse environments, and even sacrifice. Creating the ability of miniaturization, multifunctionality, and multiplicity in small-scale or mesoscale robotic systems opens numerous opportunities. It enables artificial multi locomotion swarms for exploring and monitoring diverse physical environments by deploying them en masse. It also allows compact and adaptable consumer handheld or wearable haptic robots for stimulating human multimodal touch interactions in virtual and augmented reality environments. The conventional design methods for achieving compact yet multi-degrees-of-freedom (DoF) robots are limited due to fundamental constraints on downsizing the classical electric motors, transmission gears, and mechanisms. Reducing the number of components is also difficult, so it requires a meticulous manual assembly process.

In this talk, I present my past and present research on robot miniaturization, multifunctionality, and mass-producibility (which I coined “3M problem”) with novel multimaterial composition and 3D printing methods. I formulate the design methodology for composited origami robots or Robogamis, in terms of mechanisms, geometry, components, materials, and fabrication. I further demonstrate unique robotic platforms built on this paradigm, including Tribots, 10 g palm-sized, battery-powered multi locomotion robots that jump, walk, and crawl to traverse uneven terrains and manipulate objects collectively. I present tunable power, compact actuators, and mechanisms based on functional materials, such as shape memory alloy and fluids. I conclude with my latest work at Stanford on a monolithically 3-D printed, soft fingertip haptic device called FingerPrint. The compact device produces 4-DoF motion on the finger pad with tunable forces and torques for skin shear, pressure, and vibrotactile interaction and is printable with no assembly process.

BIO: Dr. Zhenish Zhakypov is a postdoctoral researcher in the Collaborative Haptics and Robotics in Medicine Laboratory at Stanford University. His research focuses on the novel design, fabrication, and control methods for wearables and haptic interfaces. He obtained his Ph.D. degree in Robotics from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). His Ph.D. thesis presented various reconfigurable origami robots (or Robogamis) and smart-material actuators, including miniature insect-inspired robots powered by shape memory alloys that can jump, roll, crawl, and communicate. Before joining EPFL, he was with the Microsystems Laboratory at Sabanci University in Turkey, where he received his Master's degree in Mechatronics Engineering. At Sabanci, he developed nano-precision piezo stages and a desktop micro-factory, and studied accurate motion control strategies. Dr. Zhakypov is a lead author of several peer-reviewed research articles and patents. He received EPFL's Best Ph.D. Thesis Distinction and was nominated for ABB's Outstanding Thesis Award.