Carmel Majidi

Professor Carnegie Mellon University

  • Pittsburgh PA

Carmel Majidi’s mission is to discover materials and methods that allow robots and machines to behave like soft biological organisms.

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Carnegie Mellon University

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Biography

Carmel Majidi’s career mission is to discover materials, hardware architectures, and fabrication methods that allow robots and machines to behave like soft biological organisms, and be safe for contact with humans. The aim is to replace the bulky and rigid hardware in existing robots with soft, lightweight, and deformable technologies that match the functionality of natural biological tissue. Currently, his group is focused on filled-elastomer composites and soft microfluidic systems that exhibit unique combinations of mechanical, electrical, and thermal properties and can function as “artificial” skin, nervous tissue, and muscle for soft robotics and wearables. He’s particularly interested in approaches that are practical from a rapid prototyping and robotics implementation perspective. This includes efforts to enable robust mechanical and electrical interfacing between soft-matter systems and conventional microelectronics and hardware.

Areas of Expertise

Soft Robotics
Medical Device Manufacturing
Wearable Robotics
Medical Devices
Advanced Manufacturing
Devices and Material Manipulation
Robotics
Cybersecurity and Privacy
Micro/Nanoengineering

Media Appearances

2030 Job Market Forecast: The Skills And Roles You’ll Need

Forbes  online

2025-04-14

2030 job market forecast. Experts predict in five years, 92M jobs will disappear, but 170M new ones will emerge thanks to AI, automation and climate shifts. “With AI handling more tasks, the ability to evaluate AI outputs and make higher-order decisions is crucial,” said Rachel Dzombak (Heinz College). Carmel Majidi (School of Engineering) added, "It’s helpful to think not in terms of specific jobs, but in terms of skills and capabilities that are likely to be resilient.”

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Paleobionics: Dinosaurs are back

CMU News  online

2024-10-16

In a recent episode of Where What If Becomes What's Next, mechanical engineering professors Carmel Majidi and Aaron Johnson, with postdocotral researcher Aja Mia Carter, discuss paleobionics. Paleobionics is an emerging field at CMU that uses robots and Softbotics to help scientists better understand the biomechanical factors that drove evolution using extinct organisms. This understanding also inspires future robotic design.

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Carnegie Mellon core partner in new center to improve robot dexterity selected to receive up to $52 million

CMU News  online

2024-08-21

Carmel Majidi will lead a research thrust in a new multi-institutional collaboration that has received $26 million from the National Science Foundation to launch an Engineering Research Center (ERC) dedicated to revolutionizing the ability of robots to amplify human labor.

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Social

Industry Expertise

Mechanical/Industrial Engineering

Accomplishments

Inno Fire Awards Trailblazing Innovators, Pittsburgh Business Times

2023

PopTech Science Fellow

2013

George Tallman Ladd Award and Carnegie Institute of Technology Dean’s Early Career Fellowship, Carnegie Mellon University

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Education

University of California, Berkeley

Ph.D.

EECS

2007

Cornell University

B.S.

CEE

2001

Patents

Digital patch for discrete signaling, a baseball glove including same, and related method of manufacture

US12128290B1

2024

An apparatus for communication, a system thereof, and methods of manufacture thereof are provided. The apparatus comprises a body and a printed circuit board (PCB) operatively coupled to the body. The PCB comprises a processing unit, a first communication module operatively coupled to the processing unit, and an array of assemblies. The first communication module is configured to communicate with a secondary communication module wirelessly. The array of assemblies comprises at least two rows and at least two columns. Each assembly comprises a switch and a light. The array of assemblies are operatively coupled to the processing unit. Each light is configured to change a state responsive to at least one of a change in state by the switch within the same assembly and a control signal from the first communication module.

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Integrated electronic device with flexible and stretchable substrate

US12096553B2

2024

A flexible and stretchable integrated electronic device includes a substrate having a stiffness gradient, wherein a rigid electronic device is embedded within the substrate. The stiffness gradient within the substrate prevents delamination at the interface between the substrate and the embedded device. The stiffness gradient is accomplished by providing at least two distinct zones in the substrate with uniform stiffness, with each zone decreasing in stiffness as in a distance from the embedded device increases, or the gradient is accomplished by having a zone with a varying stiffness.

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Articles

A compliant metastructure design with reconfigurability up to six degrees of freedom

Nature Communications

2025

Compliant mechanisms with reconfigurable degrees of freedom are gaining attention in the development of kinesthetic haptic devices, robotic systems, and mechanical metamaterials. However, available devices exhibit limited programmability and form-customizability, restricting their versatility. To address this gap, we propose a metastructure concept featuring reconfigurable motional freedom and tunable stiffness, adaptable to various form factors and applications. These devices incorporate passive flexures and actively stiffness-changing rods to modify kinematic freedom. A rational design pipeline informs the flexures’ topological arrangements, geometric parameters, and control signals based on targeted mobilities, enabling the creation of unitary joints with up to six degrees of freedom.

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Exploiting instabilities to enable large shape transformations in dielectric elastomers

Physical Review Applied

2025

Dielectric elastomers have significant potential for new technologies, ranging from soft robots to biomedical devices, driven by their ability to display complex shape changes in response to electrical stimulus. However, an important shortcoming of current realizations is that large voltages are required for useful actuation strains. This work proposes, and demonstrates through theory and numerical simulations, a strategy to achieve large and controlled actuation by exploiting the electromechanical analogue of the Treloar-Kearsley (TK) instability. The key idea is to use the fact that the TK instability is a symmetry-breaking bifurcation, which implies the existence of a symmetry-driven constant-energy region in the energy landscape.

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Fracture-driven power amplification in a hydrogel launcher

Nature Materials

2024

Robotic tasks that require robust propulsion abilities such as jumping, ejecting or catapulting require power-amplification strategies where kinetic energy is generated from pre-stored energy. Here we report an engineered accumulated strain energy-fracture power-amplification method that is inspired by the pressurized fluidic squirting mechanism of Ecballium elaterium (squirting cucumber plants). We realize a light-driven hydrogel launcher that harnesses fast liquid vapourization triggered by the photothermal response of an embedded graphene suspension. This vapourization leads to appreciable elastic energy storage within the surrounding hydrogel network, followed by rapid elastic energy release within 0.3 ms. These soft hydrogel robots achieve controlled launching at high velocity with a predictable trajectory.

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