ROBODADA @ ERASMUS+

21.05.2026
Technical University of Applied Science Augsburg

ROBODADA Workshop: Robotic Touch — Are Handshakes Universal?

How do we greet each other when we don't share a language? And what would it feel like to be greeted by a robot?

For the second year running, pupils from the Justus-von-Liebig-Gymnasium joined us at the lab. This time it was part of an Erasmus+ school exchange, together with around 32 visiting pupils from partner schools in Portugal, Croatia and Romania. Across two sessions, some 64 students extended our ROBODADA kits with self-built hands of cardboard, wooden skewers and gaffer tape. Each pair designed three distinct handshakes for their robot and assigned them to facial expressions, happy, sad, surprised, so that simply walking up to a robot and looking at it was enough to trigger its response. In the closing gallery walk, students moved between machines, met each other's robots face-to-face, and voted with stickers for the handshake that moved them most.

The workshop opened with a multilingual warm-up: every pupil greeted someone from another country with their personal favourite handshake and taught it to their counterpart. With pupils from four countries sharing one room, the question behind the title »Are handshakes universal?«, was something they answered with their hands before they answered it with words.