Cluster Member Anna Schäffner Selected for VOJEXT S+T+ARTS Residency on Robotics

We congratulate Pre-Doctoral Candidate Anna Schäffner on her successful application to one of the three VOJEXT S+T+ARTS residencies. The selected artists were announced during the S+T+ARTS presentations at European Robotic Forum 2023 in Odense (Denmark).

Each artist will receive 30.000 Euros of funding, mentoring and access to robotics labs from March until December 2023. The goals of the VOJEXT S+T+ARTS residencies are twofold: to push for art-driven innovation and societal understanding of human-robot interactions, and to integrate them in industrial manufacturing robotics that work on construction, arts and crafts.

Anna Schäffner is taking part in the Social Robots residency, supported by industrial partner and tech-provider IIT (Fondazion Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia). Her project »Soft Collision« focuses on the design of a new robotic membrane that will demonstrate a form of interaction between human and robot through body language. The artistic approach consists of experimenting with an active and reactive membrane that deforms through pneumatic, to offer new qualities of behaviour, cognition and functionality to the robot. A digital simulation of the robot and its environment informs the design of the membrane. The digital twin simulates the impact of a close space on the robot´s behaviour to identify potential limitations. The membrane overcomes these limitations by calling on the intelligence of the material through the compliance quality of its deformation.