Case Study

Soft Robotics Week - April 13-17, 2015 Livorno-Italy

In order to show that Hot Glue Kit also works out of our lab, we have built 30 modules and attended to the organization of the Soft Robotics Week (aka School on "Applications and Frontiers of Soft Robotics") by the RoboSoft and SMART-E, which took place at the The BioRobotics Institute, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in April 13-17,2015 Livorno-Italy.

The school was attended by up to 100 international leaders and talented students from 15 countries and 46 institutions worldwide, 16 speakers, 4 working groups of experts. It presented a series of plenary and parallel brainstorming sessions, a PhD School with hands-on tutorials and robots exhibition.

Hands - on Sessions

In the soft robotics week, we organized two hands on sessions to encourage participants to build, actuate and control soft robots with the Hot Glue Kit. During the sessions which took over 12 hours in total, participants are grouped into six teams composed of 6-7 members. We gave each team the kit with 2 actuation modules and asked them to build robots which can walk, run or crawl on different floor surfaces.

The sessions are planned in two days, while in the first day participants are asked to build their robots and on the second day model and simulate these designs. However, teams decided to keep on upgrading their robots on the second day while working on their simulations at the same time. In order to motivate the teams, the school organization committee decided to make a competition on the last day of the school, where the robot of each team is put to test to locomote on three different terrains to find the fastest robot. The members of the winning team were awarded with a 3D pen.

Below are some pictures and videos from the hands on sessions and the robots built with the Hot Glue Kit.

Teams: