Robotic Couture

As Soft Robotics becomes more and more elaborated, its practice appears evident in fields such as medical systems (e.g. soft-robotic surgery), aerospace, industrial assembly systems, catastrophe intervention, and other industries involving direct contact with human beings. Due to their soft and pneumatic nature, Soft Robotics have a compelling record within the meaning of interaction, extension and mutualism of the human body. This record gives the possibility of a more compliant, sensitive and corporeal conception of technology in architecture and design. In the scenario of the contemporary, these heretical machines challenge the constraints of permanence and imply the notion of a spatial prosthetic. Just as the introduction of Virtual and Augmented Reality enlarges our capability of perception and creation of space, responsive building parts trigger a new conceptualization of vitalism and dynamism in Architecture.

In this technology seminar, Robotic Couture: About Robotic Protocols, Heretic Machines and a Prosthetic for the Contemporary, students designed and fabricated soft-robotic end-effectors for industrial KUKA robots. The end-effector's design was influenced by a distinct object and its geometric shape and topology. Each soft-robotic augmentation was equipped with a series of sensors and machine vision technology in order to interact with the geometric object.