News & Events

Recently, we successfully carried out our fourth General Assembly of the Priority Programme SPP2100 in the beautiful city of Dresden, Germany. The four days assembly with more than 45 researchers, including professors, postdocs, and PhD candidates from 13 institutes from all over Germany, exchanged information on their individual project results aiming to leverage soft material robotic systems. 

Organized by Jan Peters and Ditzia Susana García Morales, the full-day workshop Soft Robots for Humanity at this year's International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems in Kyoto was an exciting event that attracted many participants in-person and online. The workshop aimed to identify current applications for soft robotic systems and highlight the opportunities for soft robots shaping a symbiotic society and a better world of tomorrow.

The second funding period will focus on specifying the advantages of soft material systems, with particular emphasis on intrinsic material compliance and additional built-in functionality such as sensing, actuation and transformation capabilities. This highly interdisciplinary programmme seeks to improve the possibilities of technology transfer and the exchange of mutual knowledge.

The follow up to the series of successful general assemblies of the SPP2100 priority programme was organized for the third time in the beautiful city of Cologne, from 28th to 31st March, 2022. More than 40 researchers from 13 university groups were present in person at the conference, a contrast from the hybrid conference last year. Throughout the four days, the researchers had the chance to engage in valuable information exchanges and take a well-deserved break from their labs and enjoy the beautiful weather and the company of their colleagues in Cologne.

The SPP 2100 programme is a collaboration between thirteen university groups within Germany, each group hosting at least two or more PhD students. Once a year, a meeting is organized to exchange ideas and updates among different groups, usually followed by a few soft skills workshops. While this meeting is usually held in person and allows the PhD students to take a break from the labs and meet their colleagues from all over the country, this year the process was different, owing to the ongoing restrictions.

As soft robotics is becoming one of the most important and interesting fields of science, it is crucial now more than ever to introduce this field to the young scientists and researchers and to encourage them to pursue the field, in order to bring it to the heights it is more than capable of rising to. The soft robotics team at match had this ultimate objective in mind as they conducted the first workshop on Soft Robotics for the students of Leibniz University on 3rd December 2020.

General Assembly SPP2100 “Working towards the age of the soft robots”