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About

Sam Kriegman is a pioneering researcher at the intersection of robotics, artificial life, and synthetic biology, best known for co-creating the world’s first living robots—xenobots. His work focuses on using evolutionary algorithms and automated design to create soft, adaptive, and self-healing robots that blur the line between machine and organism. Kriegman’s most cited paper, “A cellular platform for the development of synthetic living living machines” (182 citations), introduced xenobots: millimeter-scale biological robots built from frog skin and heart cells that can move, heal, and cooperate. His follow-up work, “Biological Robots: Perspectives on an Emerging Interdisciplinary Field” (46 citations), helped define this new discipline. Kriegman also made major contributions to automated robot design, as shown in “Scalable sim-to-real transfer of soft robot designs” (67 citations) and “Efficient automatic design of robots” (27 citations), where he demonstrated that machine learning can outperform human engineers in creating functional soft robots. His research on shape-changing robots (149 citations) and damage recovery (51 citations) has advanced the goal of creating machines that can adapt their physical form to survive and function in unpredictable environments. Kriegman’s work has been featured in major media outlets and represents a paradigm shift toward living, evolving, and self-repairing robotic systems.