Aquatic Soft Robots

In order to forecast increasingly common extreme weather events climate scientists need a deeper understanding of the role played by the abyssal ocean in their weather prediction models. 

Oceanographic cruises are expensive and hard work: one day at sea costs more than £30K, and the crew on board is required to work 24 hours per day under all weather conditions. One current solution is to use fixed observation points, but these systems, such as moorings, require regular in-situ maintenance and data recovery.

The characteristics of soft robots—resiliency, adaptability, and manufacturability—give these systems the potential to be deployed, and to function in extreme abyssal environments.

These new technology, can respond to the need of observational oceanography to monitor remote deep ocean. Soft robotics is often associated with biomimesis, i.e. the observation of smart solutions adopted by living creatures to model the new generations of robots. How can bioinspired soft robots live under the water? Can they communicate data in real-time? What are the changes that we need to introduce in the current soft robot fabrication and modelling process to adapt to the deep sea environment? What new generation of sensor will this entail?

To answer to these questions we decided to bring together scientists from all over the world into a workshop to discuss the past, present and future challenges of Aquatic Soft Robots. In April, RoboSoft 2019, the IEEE International Conference on Soft Robotics, will take place in South Korea, Seoul. Our discussion about Aquatic Soft Robots will take place on the first day of the conference. Ours is one of a variety of other workshops about vibrant, niche topics related to soft robots.

The Aquatic Soft Robots event aims to create new synergies between two scientific branches that are usually separated: oceanography and robotics. The workshop will define the future of the Aquatic Soft Robots with a dialogue about common challenges and interests.