A4er Donal Holland led the development of this Soft Robotics Toolkit at Harvard…”everything a robot maker needs”
Massive congratulations to our education officer Donal Holland. First for his new job as visiting lecturer at Harvard University and second for the launch of the Soft Robotics Toolkit on Sept 19th.
“The Soft Robotics Toolkit is an online treasure trove of downloadable, open-source plans, how-to videos, and case studies to assist users in the design, fabrication, modeling, characterization, and control of soft robotic devices. It will provide researchers with a level of detail not typically found in academic research papers, including 3D models, bills of materials, raw experimental data, multimedia step-by-step tutorials, and case studies of various soft robot designs.
Dónal Holland, a visiting lecturer in engineering sciences at SEAS and graduate student at Trinity College Dublin, is one of the lead developers of the toolkit and is especially interested in the toolkit’s potential as an educational resource.
“One thing we’ve seen in design courses is that students greatly benefit from access to more experienced peers—say, postdocs in a research lab—who can guide them through their work,” Holland says. “But scaling that up is difficult; you quickly run out of time and people. The toolkit is designed to capture the expertise and make it easily accessible to students.”
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