Accessible Soft Robotics Education with Re-Configurable Balloon Robots
Yi-Shiun Wu, Kieran Gilday, Josie Hughes
Abstract
Soft robotics requires effective tools to educate the next generation of engineers and researchers. Stemming from a lack of universally accepted principles for education and with high barriers to entry in terms of fabrication and hardware, education to date has been highly ad hoc. We present a low-cost toolkit based on re-configurable balloon which allows rapid development of soft yet functional robots. This provides practical demonstrations of key soft robotic principles including: morphology, stiffness control, controller dependencies and modulation of environmental interactions, while grounding robot behaviours in fundamental mechani-cal models. We provide a framework for assembling balloon structures, incorporating actuation and exploring interactions. A diverse set of robots have been developed to show the potential to use this balloon-bots for educational activities for undergraduate teaching or below. In particular, different modes of locomotion are shown using robots each of which has an assembly time under 5 minutes. These robots can teach skills ranging from component integration and implementation, to key soft robotic design principles and embodied intelligence.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{iros2023_accessiblesoftro,
title = {Accessible Soft Robotics Education with Re-Configurable Balloon Robots},
author = {Yi-Shiun Wu and Kieran Gilday and Josie Hughes},
booktitle = {IROS 2023},
year = {2023}
}