Humanoid robots for everyday life: Tamim Asfour receives the Leopoldina Greve Prize
Humanoid robots that perform complex tasks in households, care facilities, or industry while learning from humans and their own experience: this is what Tamim Asfour has been researching for over 25 years. Together with his team at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), he has developed the ARMAR family of humanoid robots, spanning from ARMAR-I, one of Europe’s first humanoid robots, to today's ARMAR-7 – developing both their physical bodies and their intelligence. The engineer and computer scientist is internationally recognised as one of the leading figures in robotics and embodied Artificial Intelligence. In recognition of his research achievements in the field of humanoid robotics, the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina is now awarding Tamim Asfour the 2026 Greve Prize. The prize, which is endowed with 250,000 euros, is donated by the Helmut and Hannelore Greve Foundation for Science, Development and Culture. "Tamim Asfour’s research impressively demonstrates how concrete future technologies emerge from top-level interdisciplinary research," says Leopoldina President Bettina Rockenbach. "His approach combines mechatronics, computer science, perception, learning, and artificial intelligence into integrated systems, opening up new perspectives for the use of humanoid robots in everyday life and the working world." Humanoid robots can attract attention through spectacular movements such as somersaults or flips. Tamim Asfour’s research addresses a far more challenging question: how can robots grasp and manipulate objects in real-world environments, perform complex tasks, and learn from humans and their own experience? To achieve this, Asfour develops cognitive humanoid robots as holistic hardware and software systems that integrate perception, motion control, action planning, learning, and interaction. In experiments, ARMAR-III and ARMAR-7 support people with domestic tasks, while ARMAR-6 assists with maintenance and repair work. His work follows the approach of embodied Artificial Intelligence. For robot systems to one day work independently in households, hospitals, care facilities, or industrial environments, they require a body that interacts with the world, as well as an intelligence that learns from this interaction. Asfour developed a cognitive robot architecture featuring an episodic memory, which enables robots to store, retrieve, and describe experiences in natural language. For instance, ARMAR-7 can answer the question of what it saw in the kitchen that morning, describing objects, actions, and events from its own experience. This is considered a milestone in fundamental research on the path towards truly cognitive robots with embodied intelligence that learn incrementally through interaction. Furthermore, Asfour has created widely used, freely accessible research infrastructures, most notably the KIT Whole-Body Human Motion Database, one of the world’s largest collections of data on human full-body movements. Tamim Asfour studied electrical engineering and earned a doctorate in computer science at the University of Karlsruhe (now: Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, or KIT). He has served as an Adjunct Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) in the USA and at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Since 2012, he has been Professor of "Humanoid Robotic Systems" at the Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics (IAR) at the KIT Faculty of Informatics. There, he holds the Chair of High Performance Humanoid Technologies (H²T). He is also the spokesperson for the Robotics Institute Germany. The Greve Prize of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina is awarded to scientists or research teams working at German universities, non-university research institutes, or commercial enterprises. The award is presented every two years and recognises particularly outstanding research achievements in the fields of natural sciences/medicine and engineering sciences. The Greve Prize, on each occasion, focuses on a specific topic. This year, the topic is "Robotics and Embodied Intelligence". The prize is endowed with 250,000 euros, funded by the Greve Foundation. Further information on the Greve Prize can be found at: https://www.leopoldina.org/en/tasks/honouring-excellence/greve-prize The award ceremony will take place on Friday, 27 November 2026 at 11 am as part of a formal ceremony to which the President of the Senate of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, First Mayor Peter Tschentscher, invites guests to Hamburg City Hall. Journalists interested in attending the award ceremony are requested to contact presse@leopoldina.org via email by 6 November. Interviews with the laureate will gladly be arranged. The event will be livestreamed on the Leopoldina’s YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/NationaleAkademiederWissenschaftenLeopoldina. About the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina About the Helmut and Hannelore Greve Foundation for Science, Development and Culture |
A soft robot arm powered by algae and light
image:
A collection of soft robot arms inside custom designed aquariums
view moreCredit: Delft University of Technology / Studio Oostrum
Tiny underwater algae sway gently in the current. All of a sudden, a light shines on them and they form robotic-like arms that start to pick up small rocks and put them in floating baskets. Sounds like science-fiction, but researchers from Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands) have created a small soft robot arm covered with minuscule algae that can grasp and lift objects. And it’s powered by light. This exciting next step in biotechnology has just now been published in Nature Communications.
The tiny robot arm can perform large, reversible bending movements controlled by light. “Our proof-of-concept actuator is a green and soft strip made of two different hydrogel layers, with microalgae growing on its surface”, lead researcher Marie-Eve Aubin-Tam explains. “It is about 2 cm long and 1 mm thick. When exposed to changing light conditions, the strip can bend back and forth. The shape of the actuator can be easily changed to allow for different movement and function.”
Grasping and lifting
The robot’s movement can be used for simple tasks such as grasping and manipulating small objects, particularly in underwater environments where soft and gentle handling can be useful. As demonstrations, first author Fan Jiang and fellow researchers used the actuator to hook and lift a rubber ring and to grasp a small metal ball.
Beyond grasping, the robot can also reproduce movements found in nature. Its light-controlled bending could, for example, be incorporated into blinds or agricultural devices that change their shape or orientation in response to light. These demonstrations show how the basic bending motion could be developed into both soft robotic and biomimetic functions. But scientists are often driven by innate curiosity, Aubin-Tam admits: “We didn’t start with a specific application. Our goal has always been to bring the research of living materials to new levels. We wanted to explore what becomes possible when living cells are integrated into functional materials.”
How do they do it?
The microalgae drive the actuator through their metabolism, which depends on light. During illumination, the algae use light energy and CO2 to create their cellular “fuel” in form of sugars through photosynthesis, while they also use nitrogen to build cell components. These processes together increase the pH in the hydrogel. Jiang: “Since the two hydrogel layers respond differently to pH changes, they swell to different degrees, causing the strip to bend. When the light is switched off, the cellular fuel is “burned” releasing CO2, that shifts the pH back down. Within 10 seconds the actuator already starts bending in the opposite direction.”
Autonomous and environmentally responsive
According to Aubin-Tam, their new technology could contribute to soft robotic systems that are more autonomous and environmentally responsive in the longer term: “Microalgae are plantlike organisms that are largely self-sustaining. They use light as their energy source through photosynthesis, which gives the actuator potential for long-term operation with minimal external input. In theory, it wouldn’t require a lot of energy to run a system based on this technology.”
“It is also just exciting to directly visualise the metabolic activity in microorganisms to be honest. To see synthetic materials actually translate the algae’s biological responses into mechanical motion.”
A soft robot arm grasps a small metal ball when exposed to light [VIDEO]
A soft robot arm lifting a rubber ring when exposed to light [VIDEO]
Professor Marie-Eve Aubin-Tam at Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands) holding up a soft robot arm inside a small square aquarium.
PhD candidate Fan Jiang holding up a soft robot arm inside a small square aquarium.
Credit
Delft University of Technology / Studio Oostrum
Journal
Nature Communications
Method of Research
Experimental study
Subject of Research
Not applicable
Article Publication Date
22-Oct-2026
One small leap for a muscle, one giant step for robotics
image:
The biohybrid robot pushes off from the ground as soon as it is stimulated by an electrical impulse
view moreCredit: Balciunaite et al., Nature Communications 2026 / CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Lab-grown skeletal muscle tissue can contract, but the movement is often so slight that it is barely visible. This poses a problem for biohybrid robots designed to move using living muscles. Researchers at ETH Zurich have now demonstrated that it is not just the amount of muscle tissue that matters, but above all how the muscle and the artificial scaffold interact.
Their bioactuators combine living skeletal muscle tissue, grown from mouse muscle cells, with a soft hydrogel scaffold. This soft, water-rich material bends and stretches like living tissue. What is new is that both parts are designed together as one system. The researchers first used a computer simulation to determine where and how much muscle tissue to place and what properties the hydrogel scaffold should have.
Aiste Balciunaite and Mike Y. Michelis, co-lead authors of a study recently published in Nature Communications, jointly developed a new approach for this purpose. The muscle and the scaffold are designed together from the outset. Balciunaite, a doctoral student in the Soft Robotics Lab led by ETH Professor Robert Katzschmann, explains: “Instead of specifying a fixed form for our muscle geometry, we wanted to design the whole thing from scratch on the computer.”
Muscle movement visible to the naked eye
To do this, the researchers designed the muscle tissue configuration and the scaffold simultaneously on the computer, rather than one after the other. An algorithm searched for configurations in which the contraction of the muscle produced the greatest possible movement of the entire component. The researchers then built the computer-designed muscle actuators in the laboratory and tested them. The scaffolds were 3D-printed with light using a technique called xolography, which takes about one minute per scaffold.
“Of course, it was an iterative process,” Balciunaite recalls. The experiments provided information on material properties and manufacturing conditions, which was fed back into the computer simulation.
The result was the creation of what the researchers call bioactuators, each about 1.5 centimetres long. These actuators consist of living muscle tissue and an artificial hydrogel scaffold. They can flex so strongly that the movement is visible to the naked eye. The researchers report a range of motion up to eleven times greater than that of earlier systems with a comparable amount of muscle tissue. “With previous systems, you sometimes had to look under a microscope to see the flexing,” says Balciunaite.
Jumping, swimming, grasping
The newly developed bioactuators can jump, swim, move across a surface and grasp objects. What impressed Balciunaite the most was the jumping. Jumping, she says, is an unusual movement that requires a particularly strong change in shape. For her, this experiment shows how important the interaction between the living muscle and the soft artificial scaffold is.
With a single contraction, the actuator lifts itself about five millimetres off the bottom of the dish, a third of its body length. A walking version covers 6.2 millimetres per second, faster relative to its body length than any walking biohybrid robot reported so far.
These small robots can move so powerfully not just because of their muscle tissue. It is crucial that the muscle and the scaffold form a seamless, firm connection. Fine grooves in the scaffold help the tissue anchor firmly and align its muscle fibres. This ensures that as little muscle strength as possible is lost during the transfer to the scaffold.
Leaving the lab is still a long way off
For now, however, biohybrid robots depend on a nutrient solution that keeps their muscle tissue alive. Researchers are still a long way from developing a robot that can be used over the long term. Katzschmann explains that larger systems require an artificial blood supply: a vascular system that delivers oxygen and nutrients to the tissues and removes waste products. This is one of the biggest challenges for future development.
Another challenge is the natural variability of living tissue. Unlike industrially manufactured components, cultured muscle actuators do not all behave exactly the same way. The researchers therefore aim to better understand and control how muscle tissue develops in the laboratory as it matures.
Why use living muscles at all?
For Katzschmann, the study shows above all the potential of the interaction between living tissue and soft artificial structures. Muscles can do more than generate force. They can change their shape, thereby influencing how a body moves and flexes. The muscle shape itself becomes something engineers can design, rather than a fixed constraint to work around.
At the same time, the study shows how closely different fields of research need to work together to achieve this. Only through the interplay of cell biology, materials science, robotics and computer-aided design was it possible to develop muscle tissue and an artificial scaffold as a single integrated system.
For Katzschmann, this also offers longer-term potential: in the future, robotic systems could make greater use of the characteristics of living organisms, rather than relying solely on conventional motors and rigid components for movement. “We’re just beginning to build robots in a more natural way,” he says.
Further information
Video: https://youtu.be/gsJ6fHQmxlU
The video shows how the researchers went about building the biohybrid robots. It follows the process from computer design, through growing the muscles on hydrogel in the lab, to the swimming robot. (Video: Aiste Balciunaite / ETH Zurich)
Journal
Nature Communications
Article Title
Co-optimized volumetric muscle design for large dynamic deformations in versatile biohybrid robots
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