The Material Robotics workshop of the RSS conference at MIT was an intense day. We were energized by rapid-fire 3 minute presentations, mostly on soft and squishy robots, with breaks for posters. Here is our abstract and below is the poster from our lab, all about embedding functional fibers into materials that can sense and actuate. This work features Brian Wagner’s embroidery alignment plugin, which lets you write aligned PES embroidery files (for Brother machines) in the free vector drawing software Inkscape. With this environment, it is possible to draw shapes for laser cutting alongside the fiber paths that will be in the final structure.
Yes, the actual poster about fibers is made of fibers from Spoonflower on their Performance Knit fabric.