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Soft-growing robots are innovative devices that feature plant-inspired growth to navigate environments. Thanks to their embodied intelligence of adapting to their surroundings and the latest innovation in actuation and manufacturing, it is…
Multifunctional lattice materials are of great interest to modern engineering including aerospace, robotics, wave control, and sensing. In this work, we proposed and developed a new class of functional lattice materials called liquid metal…
Hand-wearable robots, specifically exoskeletons, are designed to aid hands in daily activities, playing a crucial role in post-stroke rehabilitation and assisting the elderly. Our contribution to this field is a textile robotic glove with…
Climbing soft robots are of tremendous interest in both science and engineering due to their potential applications in intelligent surveillance, inspection, maintenance, and detection under environments away from the ground. The challenge…
Tunable optical devices, in particular, varifocal lenses, have important applications in various fields, including imaging and adaptive vision. Recent advances in metasurfaces, which control the wavefront of light using subwavelength-spaced…
Robotic arms are essential to modern industries, however, their adaptability to unstructured environments remains limited. Soft robotic arms, particularly those actuated pneumatically, offer greater adaptability in unstructured environments…
Soft pneumatic actuators (SPA) made from elastomeric materials can provide large strain and large force. The behavior of locally strain-restricted hyperelastic materials under inflation has been investigated thoroughly for shape…
Designing soft robots poses considerable challenges: automated design approaches may be particularly appealing in this field, as they promise to optimize complex multi-material machines with very little or no human intervention.…
Precise and high-fidelity force control is critical for new generations of robots that interact with humans and unknown environments. Mobile robots, such as wearable devices and legged robots, must also be lightweight to accomplish their…
The recent discovery of electro-active polymers has shown great promises in the field of soft robotics, and was logically followed by experimental, numerical and theoretical developments. Most of these studies were concerned with systems…
Magnetic soft robots embedded with hard magnetic particles enable untethered actuation via external magnetic fields, offering remote, rapid, and precise control, which is highly promising for biomedical applications. However, designing such…
This paper presents the design of a new soft-rigid robotic platform, "GeoGami". We leverage origami surface capabilities to achieve shape contraction and to support locomotion with underactuated forms. A key challenge is that origami…
Limbless creatures can crawl on flat surfaces by deforming their bodies and interacting with asperities on the ground, offering a biological blueprint for designing efficient limbless robots. Inspired by this natural locomotion, we present…
Electrostatic actuators are simple but important switching devices for MEMS applications. Due to the difficulties associated with the electrostatic nonlinearity, precise mathematical description is often hard to obtain for the dynamics of…
Soft robots have the ability to adapt to their environment, which makes them suitable for use in disaster areas and agricultural fields, where their mobility is constrained by complex terrain. One of the main challenges in developing soft…
We provide a clear energetic insight into the catastrophic nature of the so-called creasing and pull-in instabilities in soft electro-active elastomers. These phenomena are ubiquitous for thin electro-elastic plates and are a major obstacle…
Many organisms, including various species of spiders and caterpillars, change their shape to switch gaits and adapt to different environments. Recent technological advances, ranging from stretchable circuits to highly deformable soft…
Photomechanical liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) are responsive polymers that can convert light directly into mechanical deformation. This unique feature makes these materials an attractive candidate for soft actuators capable of remote and…
Dielectric elastomers are an emerging class of highly deformable electro-active materials employed for electromechanical transduction technology. For practical applications, the design of such transducers requires a model accounting for…
Shape transformation, a key mechanism for organismal survival and adaptation, has gained importance across fields as diverse as electronics and medicine. However, designing and controlling microscale shape-shifting materials remains a…