Welcome

How can soft-bodied intelligence enhance manipulation?

This summer school will introduce attendees to the benefits and challenges of Soft Manipulation (SoMa). Soft Manipulation is the key to developing simple, compliant, yet strong, robust, and easy-to-program manipulation systems. The Summer School on Soft Manipulation is designed to educate and foster collaboration among a new generation of researchers in an interdisciplinary fashion. It will combine plenary talks from leading academic and industrial experts of related fields: neuroscience, hand-biomechanics, and robotics, with hands-on sessions. The attendees will learn about the latest findings related to hand design, control, manipulation planning, and machine learning for grasping. This knowledge will be applied and enlarged in the multidisciplinary hands-on session in which you will get to design, build, and control your own soft robotic hand.

The Summer School on Soft Manipulation is a Summer School under the auspices of the recently started project Soft Manipulation SoMa, funded by the European Commission and is supported by the Technical Education Program TEP of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society RAS and by the KUKA AG.

Moreover, we would like to acknowledge the support of the following IEEE-RAS technical committees: