The Coming Robot Revolution

Dr. Yoseph Bar-Cohen is a Senior Scientist and Group Supervisor at the Jet Propulsion Lab [http://ndeaa.jpl.nasa.gov/], NASA/Caltech, specializing in electroactive materials and devices as well as biomimetic mechanisms. Famous for his pivotal role in artificial muscles, many news articles describe him as the "artificial muscle" man and per Business week he is one of five technology gurus who are "Pushing Tech's Boundaries". Dr. Bar-Cohen received his Ph. D. in physics (1979) from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel. Some of his notable discoveries include the leaky Lamb waves (LLW) and polar backscattering (PBS) phenomena in composite materials. He (co)authored over 300 publications, made numerous presentations at national and international conferences, (co)chaired 37 conferences, has 19-registered patents and he is the (co)editor of 4 books with the topics that include artificial muscles, biologically inspired robots and biomimetics. He is the initiator of the SPIE Conf. on electroactive polymers (EAP), chairing it since 1999. He challenged wrestling match between an arm driven by EAP and human and held contents in 2005 and 2006. Dr. Bar-Cohen's research and accomplishments with his teams received extensive media coverage including journals, magazines, radio and TV interviews as well as internet coverage in many thousands of websites [http://ndeaa.jpl.nasa.gov/nasa-nde/nde-aa-l/newsclipping.htm]. His scientific, engineering and technology accomplishments have earned him Fellow of the American Society for Nondestructive Testing (ASNT), since 1996, and The International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE), since 2002. Also, he is the recipient of two NASA Honor Award Medals - NASA Exceptional Engineering Achievement Medal (2001), and NASA Exceptional Technology Achievement (2006), two SPIE's Lifetime Achievement Awards - NDE (2001) and Smart Materials and Structures (2005), the 2006 ASNT Sustained Excellence award the 2007 SPIE President's Award as well as