Shaping the Future of Robotics through Materials Innovation

Topic of the workshop

Functional soft materials have the potential to revolutionize the field robotics. They promise to provide new functions and to lead to increased performance compared to current robot technologies. Over the last decade an active academic research community has emerged, which again and again demonstrates the tremendous capabilities of functional soft materials in proof-of-principle demonstrations. However, functional soft materials are rarely found in real-world robotic systems (see Rothemund et al. Nat. Mater. 20, 1582 (2021) for a detailed discussion). In this workshop we will discuss issues that still stand in the way of the use of functional materials in practical robotic systems and jointly develop possible solutions for these issues.