Explore Engineering | The Robot Incubator | College of Engineering

The Robot Incubator works with the community to bring engineering more down to Earth and promote its accessibility to students. One of our favorite ways is to put together hands-on experiments and demonstrations where students are placed in teams, then build their own actuators, test them, and finally compare their actuator performances against one another.

Lab alumni, Dom Flores, presents to students about Pneumatic Network Actuators (PneuNets) in a conference room. Students are seated at the conference tables with Dom standing at the front of the room presenting from a TV.

Lab alumni, Dom Flores, presents to students about Pneumatic Network Actuators (PneuNets).

Institute of Materials Science at UConn hosted a community outreach event with high school students. Members from the lab put together various hands-on experiments for students to manufacture and test McKibben actuators to demonstrate the functionality of soft actuators.

Lab member, Anatol Gogoj in the foreground, demonstrates the manufacturing process of a McKibben actuator. Lab member, Alex White in the background, demonstrates the usage of student-built McKibben actuators as a functional bicep muscle on a plastic skeleton.

Lab member, Anatol Gogoj in the foreground, demonstrates the manufacturing process of a McKibben actuator.

Hao Gu from San Jose, CA, was a summer researcher and rising senior in high school before starting his undergraduate studies at UCLA.

Hao Gu sitting at a lab bench in the Robot Incubator showing a soft strain sensor on his right hand.

Dr. Alexander Yin (URI PhD 2024) giving a presentation on buoyancy control to a group of pre-engineering students at the Barrington High School in Barrington, Rhode Island.