I delivered the opening plenary talk at RoboSoft 2024 with this provocation: “The future of robotics does not belong to roboticists”. My talk provided my personal reflections and insights into the progression, potential, and intricacies of soft-robotics. In keeping with the central theme of the 2024 conference I placed particular emphasis on the use of bioinspired and fluidic technologies in the context of exploration. A central feature of my talk was the use of a list of “propositions”; a technique that is widely used in The Netherlands, but rarely used elsewhere. I really appreciate the concision of a list of propositions, they provide succinct and definitive statements which describe the central thesis and learnings from a body of work. Before delivering my talk I distributed print-outs of the propositions to the audience, so they were aware of the structure and so that they had a physical copy of the key points. A link to the hand-out is here.
In this essay I aim to add some of the additional colour, caveats, and clarifications that I provided in the presentation and subsequent discussion. This is a live document and I’ll continue to return to this essay to provide more details and clarity on the central propositions as my thinking evolves.
The future of robotics does not belong to roboticists.
The future of robotics is soft (and hard, and both…). Soft adds value to hard… it’s a different quest not a competition.
Biomimicry and bioinspired engineering are fundamentally different quests.
Materials are the foundation. We need to learn from what we see and build from what we have.
Extreme environments are an interesting initial application space. We should focus on robust and safe operation of simple and low-cost sub-systems that are designed for circularity.
Modelling the flow of energy in soft systems enables a focus on dynamics rather than kinematics.
Flow represents a new and very beneficial mode of actuating and controlling soft systems.
Flow control requires both digital and analog fluidic logic.
To reach adolescence, we – the soft robotics community – need to play AND we need to mature our best ideas into the application space: moving from interesting to useful.