About the Workshop

The soft robotics and active materials fields are rapidly converging toward a new class of physical systems that can autonomously adapt to their surrounding environment, self-organize into specific shapes or to exhibit specific functions that are reminiscent of those exhibited by natural systems. This half-day workshop will explore the fundamental principles of soft, adaptive, and distributed systems, and how combining these principles can enable diverse uses like self-organizing robot collectives into diverse formations through local interactions, programmable mechanical and material properties that enable robots to exhibit novel gaits that allow them to move through diverse environments, and even roboticized matter that blurs the boundary between robots and materials and can exhibit diverse phase transitions to help us learn how fundamental mechanisms related to mechanical compliance, embodied sensing, and local interactions can be exploited to execute specific robotic functions. We will bridge concepts from robotics, nonlinear dynamics, control theory, and materials science and will enable researchers from diverse disciplines to engage and cross-pollinate ideas from each other’s fields. The workshop will consist of oral presentations by invited speakers, an interactive panel discussion with representation from the various disciplines of interest in the workshop, and a poster session in which younger participants (graduate students and postdocs) are able to present some of their latest work on the subject. Ultimately, the goal of this workshop is to have researchers from diverse disciplines examine how soft robotics can be exploited to enable more robust self-organizing collective systems and more versatile active metamaterials.