Soft Robotics Meetup January 12th 6:30pm

We have a great agenda planned, with:

• (1) a presentation from Dr. Carmel Majidi from Carnegie Mellon's Soft Machines lab,

• (2) an introduction of the Soft Robotics Toolkit, and

• (3) Meetup Member topics

Details:

(1) We are pleased to welcome comments by Carnegie Mellon's Dr. Carmel Majidi for our next meetup on Monday January 12th. Please join us as we hear from him, and discuss other current academic and entrepreneurial advances in this exciting new field.

Dr. Majidi's group at Carnegie Mellon conducts groundbreaking academic soft robotics research, and also served as a resource for Disney in the development of Big Hero 6. See IEEE's video on Disney's use of Carnegie Mellon's soft robotics research here: IEEE videos on Big Hero 6 R&D, featuring Dr. Majidi (http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-hardware/video-friday-real-big-hero-robots-3d-chappie-trailer).

Here is an example of a soft robotics arm developed by Carnegie Mellon's Soft Machine's lab:

http://photos3.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/b/7/5/a/600_432586938.jpeg

For more information, please visit Dr. Majidi's Carnegie Mellon web page. (http://www.cmu.edu/me/people/majidi.html)

(2) Introduction of the Soft Robotics Toolkit. The Soft Robotics Toolkit has recently been launched by a collection of institutes associated with Harvard University. It is a free open source toolkit, including software and hardware recommendations, as well as instructions, for making your own soft robot. It is targeted at educators, researchers, makers and engineers as well as hobbyists. Their website announces a new soft robotics competition: “The Soft Robotics Design Competition 2015 rewards individuals and teams that create new and interesting projects using material they can find on the toolkit website. The 2015 Prize for Contributions in Soft Robotics rewards academic researchers for sharing their work and advancing the field. The competitions include $10,000 in prizes!”

I will be reviewing the software and hardware included in this toolkit, and will bring an example of some of the hardware (beta version).

http://softroboticsto... (http://softroboticstoolkit.com/)­

(3) Meetup Member topics. Message me via Meetup if you would like to present a topic of interest.

Hope to see you there!