This Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) project will support the development of contact-aware robots which would leverage touch in intelligent ways. Existing efforts in soft robotics have aimed to limit robot interaction with physical disturbances in the environment for operational efficiency and safety considerations. However, contact-rich tasks such as fruit picking in dense trees will require robots which can appropriately apply and withstand contact with as much adaptability and robustness as humans, all the while remaining safe to be nearby. This project will advance fundamental knowledge and tools of robots designed to work with, instead of against, contact by investigating how passive responses and reactions to touch can be designed in a soft robot arm to do useful tasks, such as avoiding damage, seeking support, and automatically grasping target objects. Soft continuum robots with contact awareness will provide robust and adaptable solutions for domains where labor shortages are growing or where the risk to human workers can be significant, such as healthcare, agriculture, hazardous inspection, and search-and-rescue. The educational activities will leverage soft robot design tools from the research project to develop hands-on kits that use cost effective components to help middle and high school students explore basic engineering and science topics. These kits are expected to deepen students’ knowledge of these topics as well as giving opportunities for graduate student trainees to engage in educational development. Ecological psychology frames the environment and the agent, such as a soft continuum robot, as a combined system. An agent's behavior emerges from the dynamics of the combined agent and environment system, where the interaction has sufficient information both for adaptive behavior to emerge and for a representation of the environment to be encoded. Within this framing, this project aims to create passive open-loop behaviors, rea