Professor Hamad Shahsavan, a RoboHub collaborator in the field of soft robots who recently joined Waterloo as a faculty member, is the lead author of a paper chosen as a finalist for a 2020 Cozzarelli Prize recognizing the top work published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The paper, titled "Bioinspired underwater locomotion of light-driven liquid crystal gels",was written with colleagues in Finland while he was at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany and focused on the development of a gel-like robot, inspired by sea slugs and snails, that is steerable by light.
Shahsavan's current research interests revolve around the development of a variety of soft, stimuli-responsive, and programmable materials, as well as emerging fabrication strategies for manufacturing small-scale mobile robots and devices.
For more details on this research, watch the video below or see the Waterloo Engineering News article.