Soft Robotics Education

Abstract

Robotics education poses a significant challenge because it involves a number of different technological components and disciplines. So far, most of the existing teaching approaches focus on robots with fixed morphologies and rigid structures, which cover only subsets of the entire spectrum of related knowledge. From this perspective, this article explores an application of soft robotics research for robotics education and discusses the challenges and perspectives. We argue that the use of soft materials is crucial for understanding and teaching of a variety of topics related to intelligent adaptive systems. Along with the conceptual discussion, we introduce how the concept can be implemented into practical educational programs and report the latest concrete achievements in our lecture series.