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Soft robotics requires effective tools to educate the next generation of engineers and researchers. Stemming from a lack of universally accepted principles for education and with high barriers to entry in terms of fabrication and hardware, education to date has been highly ad hoc. We present a low-cost toolkit based on re-configurable balloon which allows rapid development of soft yet functional robots. This provides practical demonstrations of key soft robotic principles including: morphology, stiffness control, controller dependencies and modulation of environmental interactions, while grounding robot behaviours in fundamental mechanical models. We provide a framework for assembling balloon structures, incorporating actuation and exploring interactions. A diverse set of robots have been developed to show the potential to use this balloon-bots for educational activities for undergraduate teaching or below. In particular, different modes of locomotion are shown using robots each of which has an assembly time under 5 minutes. These robots can teach skills ranging from component integration and implementation, to key soft robotic design principles and embodied intelligence.
Pierre Dillenbourg, Elmira Yadollahi, Ana Paiva
Jamie Paik, Lei Wang, Ke Liu, Hongying Zhang, Yongkang Jiang, Xin Tong