[Feb. 2, 2026] Special Lecture by Prof. Pierre Lambert: "Soft microrobotics : crossing point between mechanics, small scale and compliance"
Prof. Pierre Lambert will give a talk entitled "Soft microrobotics : crossing point between mechanics, small scale and compliance".
All are welcomed to join. Please register here (contact form) if you wish to attend the lecture.
Speaker :Prof. Pierre Lambert
Professor, Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium
Abstract
Soft microrobotics : crossing point between mechanics, small scale and compliance
For decades, robotics has been pushing stiffness to increase resonance frequency and using piezo-actuators as reference smart materials.
Nowadays, new microfabrication techniques for small scales and the emergence of compliant active and sensitive materials opens new ways to produce/sense motion and force below the millimeter. This talk will present two ongoing solutions currently investigated at ULB: using glass and photonic Bragg grating to produce instrumented compliant mechanisms, and using heterogenous polymerization of hydrogels to build active cubes at 100µm scale to produce selective kinematics on purpose.
References
- Instrumented Flexible Glass Structure: A Bragg Grating Inscribed with Femtosecond Laser Used as a Bending Sensor: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/23/19/8018
- A Voxel-Based Approach for the Generation of Advanced Kinematics at the Microscale: https://onlinelibrary-wiley-com.ezproxy.ulb.ac.be/doi/10.1002/aisy.202200394
Short Biography
Prof. dr. ir. Pierre LAMBERT obtained his MSc in mechanical engineering in 1998 (ULB), his PhD in engineering sciences in 2004 (ULB) and his habilitation in 2010 (U. Franche-Comté). After a postdoc at EPFL (2005) and at U Pierre et Marie Curie (2006), he was appointed as assistant professor at ULB in 2007 (in micro-engineering). In 2010 he got a CNRS position at FEMTO-ST (France) and then moved to the LIMMS French-Japanese lab in Tokyo (2010-2011). He is currently Full Professor at ULB, with research activities in the field of soft microrobotics. He is one of the Professors in charge of the MicroMilli platform at ULB (http://micromilli.ulb.be/), equiped with simulation, manufacturing and characterization tools for engineering at small scales (<1mm). From October 2022 to December 2025, he was the Vice Dean for International Relations of the ULB engineering school (=Ecole Polytechnique de Bruxelles). He is currently Rector’s advisor for research in the European Alliance CIVIS (In 2024-2025, he chaired the CIVIS research council).