Buse Aktaş is an engineer and artist, and an Independent Research Group Leader at Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. She has an educational background in mechanical engineering, visual arts and design, work experience in the home appliances industry, and has conducted apprenticeships in several traditional crafts (e.g. broommaking, locksmithing). Her research focuses on developing new families of active materials and structures that enhance the mechanical interactions between robots and their environments and robots and humans.
Her prior work focused on achieving multidimensional tunable mechanical behavior utilizing jamming - a phenomenon in which the mechanical behavior of a cluster of components can be modified by altering the coupling between them. She has designed, modeled, fabricated and tested families of jamming-based tunable functional metamaterials, which enable mechanical versatility, primarily by selectively exploiting passive mechanics in different task-specific degrees of freedom. She has utilized pneumatic actuation methods and created new untethered and remote actuation methods for jamming, based on magnetic interaction forces. She has showcased the robotic capabilities offered by jamming-based composites by designing systems for robotic manipulators, medical robots (wearable and surgical), and interactive art.