CRL had a great presence at this year’s Toronto Robotics Conference, hosted at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Congratulations to Tongjia for a second successful year organizing the event! Nicholas, Andrea, and Spencer delivered research presentations on current and future directions. The poster session featured posters (and demos!) from Rozilyn, Nicholas, Mark, Jimmy, Ella, Spencer, and Aedan. Rozilyn took home the Second Place poster prize for showcasing her work “Getting in Touch: Towards Distributed Contact Force Localization via Magnetic Sensing”.

Day 1 of the conference featured a pitch competition sponsored by TwoSmallFish. Ella presented “Streamline”, a soft robotic fish platform for continuous in-water monitoring, saving owners of water infrastructure time and money spent on manual inspection. Streamline won First Place and the People’s Choice award! This pitch competition comes at the tail end of Ella, Jimmy, and Jessica completing Phase 1 of the Eva and Allen Lau Commercialization Catalyst program. Throughout the program, the team learned how to ask questions to de-risk business opportunity ideas, and practiced techniques for scaling research technology toward commercialization. Huge thanks to Hong Luo for her continued mentorship throughout Phase 1! After exploring (and ruling out) many ideas for product-market fit, the team found some traction and is super excited to continue exploring the potential of soft robots for underwater inspection with new stakeholders.

Photos by Neil Ta

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