Tensegrity Workshop 2025

RoboSoft 2025 - Lausanne Switzerland

Organizers:

Description

As compliant structures with tunable stiffness, tensegrities are a compelling platform with which to study the spectrum of robotic morphologies, ranging from soft to rigid. This workshop will provide a forum to discuss recent advances and challenges in the field of soft tensegrity robotics. Our ambition for this workshop is to use it as an opportunity to diversify and expand the community of those engaged in tensegrity research. This workshop will provide participants from a wide variety of fields including engineering, computer science, mathematics, and architecture with an opportunity to present and discuss the current state of the art in tensegrity robotic research through invited talks, live robot demonstrations, breakout sessions to explore the Grand Challenges of the field, an interactive panel discussion, and a student-focused poster session.

Tensegrities are relatively simple mechanical systems, consisting of a number of rigid elements (struts) joined at their endpoints by tensile elements (cables or springs), and kept stable through a synergistic interplay of pre-stress forces. Beyond engineering, properties of tensegrity have been demonstrated at all scales of the natural world, ranging from the tendinous network of the human hand to the mechanotransduction of living cells. At every scale, tensegrity structures have an impressive strength-to-weight ratio and demonstrate robustness and stability through deformation. Moreover, tensegrity structures are inherently modular (consisting of only struts and springs). This means that increasingly complex tensegrity structures can be constructed simply by increasing the number of struts and springs. They are simple enough to be baby toys and complex enough to serve as the basis for the next generation of NASA’s planetary rovers.

Tensegrity structures are therefore a compelling and versatile platform with which to explore a wide range of topics and applications relevant to the broader IEEE-RAS community, including biomimetics, bio-inspired robots, soft material robotics, compliant joint/mechanisms, and tendon/wire mechanisms (to name just a few). The goal of this workshop is to provide a showcase for tensegrity researchers to present advances in the state of the art and to discuss ongoing challenges while simultaneously attracting and engaging new participants in the field.

This will be the fifth workshop in a series dating back to RoboSoft 2018 in Livorno, Italy. This year, we are deviating from the traditional workshop format to provide a more engaging forum for participants with the aim of celebrating the interdisciplinary nature of tensegrity research and broadening participation in the field.

Call for Contributions

We are calling for participants to contribute poster presentations and live demonstrations at the workshop. We encourage participants to present live demos if possible! Submissions do not need to specifically focus on tensegrity robots, but they should be of interest to the tensegrity robotics community. Those interested should submit a one-page abstract in IEEE conference format using this form. Templates are available for download at the IEEE Template Selector. You may also include a link to supplementary materials (e.g., videos). The submission deadline is Sunday, March 23, 2025 AoE. All participants will be invited to a future special issue on tensegrity robotics.

Specific topics include (but are not limited to):

Schedule (all times GMT+1)

Direct all correspondence to John Rieffel (rieffelj@union.edu)

Prior Workshops

An archive of the workshop series we’ve been running since 2018