Invited Talk Title: Design and Fabrication of Fluidically-Driven Soft Robots for Remote Education
Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the importance of digital fabrication to enable online learning, which remains a challenge for robotics courses. We introduce a teaching methodology that allows students to participate remotely in a hands-on robotics course involving the design and fabrication of robots. Our methodology employs 3D printing techniques with flexible filaments to create innovative soft robots; robots are made from flexible, as opposed to rigid, materials. Students design flexible robotic components such as actuators, sensors, and controllers using CAD software, upload their designs to a remote 3D printing station, monitor the print with a web camera, and inspect the components with lab staff before being mailed for testing and assembly. At the end of the course, students will have iterated through several designs and created fluidically-driven soft robots. Our remote teaching methodology enables educators to utilize 3D printing resources to teach soft robotics and cultivate creativity among students to design novel and innovative robots. Our methodology seeks to democratize robotics engineering by decoupling hands-on learning experiences from expensive equipment in the learning environment.
Bio: Dr. Nemitz obtained his B.Eng. in electrical engineering from Bochum University in Germany and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in electronics and electrical engineering under supervision of Dr. Adam Stokes from the University of Edinburgh. His doctoral studies focused on collective perception in robot swarms developing simplistic robots and computationally inexpensive classification algorithms for multi-modal sensing. During his doctoral studies, Dr. Nemitz was a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, collaborating with Prof. Edwin Olson. Following his graduate research, he trained as a postdoctoral fellow in the Whitesides Research Group at Harvard University, before starting as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Robotics Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in July 2020.
