The Future of Robotics: Soft Material Robots

PLEASE REGISTER FOR THE EVENT HERE: https://localevents.theiet.org/bb8c1e

Departing from traditional types of robots, which are based on an arrangement of rigid link elements connected via joints, soft material robots are made of fundamentally different structures. With the increased interest in the use of soft materials for the creation of highly dexterous robots, soft material robotics has established itself as an important research topic within soft robotics.

This talk will present a number of soft material robots with applications in healthcare, industrial settings and autonomous driving. Examples include miniaturised soft, stiffness-controllable manipulators for minimally invasive surgery and large-scale structures that guide drivers when changing between different levels of autonomy in highly automated vehicles. Scalability, stiffness controllability and modelling are challenging topics in the field of soft robotics that will be discussed along with innovative opportunities for future systems.

Helge Wurdemann (helge-wurdemann.com) is a roboticist and Associate Professor of Robotics leading research on soft haptics and robotics at UCL Mechanical Engineering. His group (www.softhaptics.website) has currently more than 15 researchers. Dr Wurdemann is also Co-Director of the Intelligent Mobility at UCL lab, a full-size driving simulator embedded at UCL PEARL (www.pearl.place). He has authored/co-authored more than 100 peer-reviewed papers.