Tutors: Ruairi Glynn, Vincent Huyghe
The workshop took place at the Bartlett and was attended by the M.arch students of the IAL.

The workshop began with the fundamentals of industrial robots with a lecture outlining the theory and terminology followed by some practical exercises. The software used for robotic motion control is based in grasshopper so we followed up with a short introduction to the software tools. Once the participants had a grasp of the fundamentals. The brief stipulated designing an Arduino controlled end effector that would operate in conjunction with the robot. The interaction was controlled through state machines, each state representing a different behaviour. The state switching is dictated by sensory inputs such as a: kinect, proximity sensor or capacitive sensor. In order for the arduino, robot and computer to communicate participants had to develop custom communication protocols

The goal of the workshop is to provide the students with insight into robotics and what is required to develop robotic systems capable of interaction. The students proved up to challenge as the following project videos demonstrate.

The hanger: puppeted robot behaviour.

Bookworm: dynamic behaviours based on kinect data.

Trunk: dynamic behaviour based on capacitive sensing (whiskers) and proximity sensing.

Blinky Lamp: dynamic behaviour based on proximity sensing.

Jelly Fish: Pneumatic Soft/Hard Robot Prototype