RoboSoft Conference 2022 Full-Day Workshop

Software for Soft Robotics Research

LIVE EVENT: 4 April 2022, Edinburgh - Venue (McEwan Hall, Reception room 1.3 on the 1st floor)

Soft Robotics is a trending multi-disciplinary research topic inspired by highly dexterous and deformable biological bodies in the form of intrinsically soft robotic platforms. However, the compliance offered by soft robots has disadvantages resulting in modeling, design optimization, system analysis, control, and automation challenges hindering their real-world deployment. Developing software frameworks for addressing the aforementioned needs in Soft Robotics research is receiving increased attention recently. Such frameworks should be easy to use to be widely accepted by the multidisciplinary Soft Robotics research community that gathers researchers from different expertise and backgrounds. This workshop brings together the academic and industrial viewpoints on the requirements and ways to address the grand challenge of achieving a unified software framework for Soft Robotics Research.

The main aim of the workshop is to introduce the already available toolkits to the wider community and to inspire new approaches in developing such platforms for soft robots with the application and user experience in mind. We will bring together recognized experts in both modeling and control of soft robots, trying to answer questions such as:

What are the impacts of such frameworks?
What are the immediate and most general requirements in the Soft Robotics community to be addressed by a soft robotic platform?
How to decide between existing soft robotic toolkits for a given simulation, analysis, or control task?
How to design an easy-to-use toolkit to be widely accepted for multidisciplinary Soft Robotics research?
What are the means of achieving fast yet accurate computational performance for a variety of tasks such as modeling, design optimization, controller design, and deep-learning research?
How to achieve inter-operable platforms compatible with standard platforms in the community such as (e.g. C/C++, Python, Matlab, and ROS?
What problems cannot be solved with a 'perfect' simulator?

Full-Day Workshop and Poster Session

Invited Talks & Micro-Tutorials

Invited talks of widely recognized experts behind the development of fifteen soft robotic toolkits

Poster Sessions & Prizes

Poster presentations in the form of 2-minute teasers and poster stands during coffee breaks

Panel Discussion

The event will be concluded with a panel discussion and closing remarks from the organisers.

Panel Discussion

Panel discussions will primarily address the questions from the audience. Additionally, we will discuss some of the ongoing questions of the community:

Morning Panel Discussion: Software for Accurate Physics & Learning

What are the means of achieving fast yet accurate computational performance for various tasks such as modeling, design optimization, controller design, and deep-learning research?
What are the features of an easy-to-use toolkit to be widely accepted for multidisciplinary Soft Robotics research?
What problems can not be solved with a 'perfect' simulator?
How to achieve inter-operable platforms compatible with standard platforms in the community such as C/C++, Python, Matlab, and ROS?

Afternoon Panel Discussion: Soft Robots as Soft Beams

What are the impacts of soft robotic toolkits?
When deciding between existing soft robotic toolkits for a given simulation, analysis, or control task, what factors should we consider?
What fraction of the soft robotic systems can be modeled using Soft Beams?
What are the immediate and most general requirements in the Soft Robotics community to be addressed by a soft robotic platform?

Call for Posters

We would like to invite submissions from all respective fields to the topic of interests. Graphical abstract, a single, concise, pictorial, and visual summary of the poster, should be submitted via the below form. It could either be a key figure from the poster or better still a figure that is specially designed for the purpose, which captures the content of the poster to be submitted. We are following an open format for the submissions. The submissions will be reviewed by the organizers and if accepted will be considered for interactive Poster Sessions.

Best Poster Prizes: MathWorks® and COMSOL are sponsoring three workshop poster presentation prizes, up to $400. Authors will be invited to submit full-length manuscripts to a special issue in Frontiers in Robotics and AI around the workshop topic.

Deadline: 25 March 2022

Topics of interest:

Soft Robotics
Modelling and Simulation
Analysis, Optimization, and Control
Software Frameworks & User Studies

Submit Abstract Here

Speakers

Prof. Christian Duriez

INRIA, France

(SOFA framework)

Prof. Federico Renda

Khalifa University, UAE

(SoRoSim)

Prof. John Rieffel

Union College in Schenectady, NY, US

Prof. Josh Bongard

University of Vermont, US

(Silico)

Prof. Mattia Gazzola

University of Illinois, US

(PyElastica)

Prof. Minchen Li

UCLA, US

(IPC)

Dr. Stanislao Grazioso

University of Naples Federico II, Italy

(SimSoft)

Dr. Adnan Munawar

Johns Hopkins University, US

(AMBF)

Dr. Andrew Spielberg

MIT, US

(ChainQueen)

Dr. Hugo Talbot

INRIA, France

(SOFA framework)

Dr. James Bern

MIT, US

(Soft IK)

Dr. Robbie Balcombe

COMSOL, UK

(COMSOL)

Dr. Sam Kriegman

Harvard, US

(Silico for Xenobots)

Dr. S.M.Hadi Sadati

King’s College London, UK

(TMTDyn)

Dr. You Wu

Mathworks, US

(Matlab)

Moritz Alexander Graule

Harvard, US

(SoMo)

Rianna Jitosho

Stanford, US

(Vine Simulator)

Pingchuan Ma

MIT, US

(DiffAqua)

Sponsors & Endorsements

The workshop has confirmed sponsorship from three sources, representing both the industrial and academic sides. Mathworks and COMSOL, our industrial sponsors, are sponsoring workshop poster presentation prizes (COMSOL: £500, Mathworks: $1000). Frontiers in Robotics and AI, our academic sponsor, has expressed strong interest in a special issue around the workshop topic, titled “Design, Modeling and Control of Kinematically Redundant Robots”, as well as support in the cross-promotional advertisement of the workshop via their channels.

The workshop is seeking endorsement by the IEEE Technical Committee on Control, Wearable Robotics, and Medical Robotics.