Soft robotics requires effective tools to educate the next generation of engineers and researchers. Stemming from a lack of universally accepted principles for education and with high barriers to entry in terms of fabrication and hardware, education to date has been highly ad hoc. We present a low-cost toolkit based on re-configurable balloon which allows rapid development of soft yet functional robots. This provides practical demonstrations of key soft robotic principles including: morphology, stiffness control, controller dependencies and modulation of environmental interactions, while grounding robot behaviours in fundamental mechani-cal models. We provide a framework for assembling balloon structures, incorporating actuation and exploring interactions. A diverse set of robots have been developed to show the potential to use this balloon-bots for educational activities for undergraduate teaching or below. In particular, different modes of locomotion are shown using robots each of which has an assembly time under 5 minutes. These robots can teach skills ranging from component integration and implementation, to key soft robotic design principles and embodied intelligence.

This article presents the novel modular version of the robotic platform Cellulo, a versatile handheld robot initially designed as an educational robot. The use of Cellulo in different contexts and applications over the years has highlighted the need for modularity. Modularity adds versatility by increasing the spectrum of functionalities of the robot, as well as more robustness. Modulo Cellulo consists of three modules: a main module, a battery module, and an interaction module. We describe the new Modulo Cellulo platform, the different modules design, the mechanical and electrical inter-connectivity between them, the new adaptive controller, and the application development framework. As a show case, we present the addition of the reconfigurable robot Mori as a module for Cellulo, in an activity envisioning the collaboration between reconfigurable swarm robots.

In this paper, we present a series of studies on using Rubik's Twist, a type of low-cost twistable artefact, to create haptic proxies for various hand-graspable VR objects. Our pilot studies validated the feasibility and effectiveness of Rubik's-Twist-based haptic proxies. The pilot results also revealed user challenges in the physical shape creation, motivating the development of the HapTwist toolkit. The toolkit consists of the shape-generation algorithm, the software interface for shape-construction guidance and interaction authoring, and the hardware modules for constructing interactive haptic proxies. The user studies showed that HapTwist was easy to learn and use, and it significantly improved user performance in creating interactive haptic proxies with Rubik's Twist. Furthermore, HapTwist-generated haptic proxies achieved similar VR experience as the real objects.

In this study, we investigated and compared the effectiveness of visual, auditory, and vibrotactile directional cues on multiple simultaneous visual-searching tasks in an immersive virtual environment. Effectiveness was determined by the task-completion time, the range of head movement, the accuracy of the identification task, and the perceived workload. Our experiment showed that the on-head vibrotactile display can effectively guide users towards virtual visual targets, without affecting their performance on the other simultaneous tasks, in the immersive VR environment. These results can be applied to numerous applications (e.g. gaming, driving, and piloting) in which there are usually multiple simultaneous tasks, and the user experience and performance could be vulnerable.