Date: September 9, 2026
Speaker: Amira Abdel-Rahman, Assistant Professor, Cornell University
Title: Inverse Design of Material-Robot Systems
Host: Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee
Abstract: Robotic systems are increasingly expected to operate in unstructured environments, construct at large scales, and adapt after deployment. Yet conventional design workflows often separate morphology, material, fabrication, and control, making it difficult to create systems that are scalable, reconfigurable, and repairable.
In this talk, I will present inverse design workflows for material-robot systems. Inspired by how digitization transformed communication and computing, these systems apply principles of discretization, hierarchy, distributed computation, and error correction to physical matter. Digital material units with embedded mechanical, electrical, sensing, actuation, and computational properties provide a shared substrate for both structures and robots.
Using a shared discrete representation across simulation, optimization, fabrication, assembly planning, and control, these workflows enable the design of heterogeneous structures, robotic assembly sequences, and reconfigurable behaviors within a unified framework. Applications range from adaptive infrastructure and aerospace structures to modular robots, physical computing, and autonomous construction.
Bio: Amira Abdel-Rahman is an Assistant Professor at Cornell University, with a joint appointment in the multicollege Department of Design Tech and the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, where she leads the Architected Matter Group.
Before joining Cornell, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Engineering Design and Computing Laboratory at ETH Zürich. She earned her Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Bits and Atoms, where she developed inverse-design workflows powered by physics-informed artificial intelligence for the design and fabrication of large-scale material-robot systems.
She holds a Master’s in Design Studies in Technology from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a bachelor’s degree from the American University in Cairo. Her professional experience includes positions at NVIDIA on the Simulation Technology team and at Autodesk in the Generative Design group, where she contributed to research at the intersection of computational design, artificial intelligence, and simulation.