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It is highly desirable to discover an electromechanical coupling that allows a dielectric material to generate curvature in response to a uniform electric field, which would add a new degree of freedom for designing actuators.…
Through the implementation of reconfigurability to achieve flexibility and adaptation to tasks by morphology changes rather than by increasing the number of joints, malleable robots present advantages over traditional serial robot arms in…
Thin elastic sheets bend easily and, if they are patterned with cuts, can deform in sophisticated ways. Here we show that carefully tuning the location and arrangement of cuts within thin sheets enables the design of mechanical actuators…
Soft robots are powerful tools for manipulating delicate objects, yet their adoption is hindered by two gaps: the lack of integrated tactile sensing and sensor signal distortion caused by actuator deformations. This paper addresses these…
Designing robotic systems that can change their physical form factor as well as their compliance to adapt to environmental constraints remains a major conceptual and technical challenge. To address this, we introduce the Granulobot, a…
Soft electroactive materials can undergo large deformation subjected to either mechanical or electrical stimulus, and hence they can be excellent candidates for designing extremely flexible and adaptive structures and devices. This paper…
Topology optimization is a powerful tool utilized in various fields for structural design. However, its application has primarily been restricted to static or passively moving objects, mainly focusing on hard materials with limited…
Soft Robotics presents a rich canvas for free-form and continuum devices capable of exerting forces in any direction and transforming between arbitrary configurations. However, there is no current way to tractably and directly exploit the…
Components of technical systems and devices often require self-lubricating properties, which are implemented by means of dry lubricants. However, continuous lubricant coatings on the components' surfaces often suffer from poor adhesion,…
Liquid crystal elastomers realize a fascinating new form of soft matter that is a composite of a conventional crosslinked polymer gel (rubber) and a liquid crystal. These {\em solid} liquid crystal amalgams, quite similarly to their…
Soft elastic composite materials can serve as actuators when they transform changes in external fields into mechanical deformation. Here, we address the corresponding deformational behavior of magnetic gels and elastomers, consisting of…
It is well recognized that the miniaturization of electromechanical devices will bring a revolution to humanity in the coming decades synonymous with the effects of miniaturizing electronic devices in those previous. An electromechanical…
This chapter is about the fundamentals of fabrication, control, and human-robot interaction of a new type of collaborative robotic manipulators, called malleable robots, which are based on adjustable architectures of varying stiffness for…
Origami offers a promising alternative for designing innovative soft robotic actuators. While features of origami, such as bi-directional motion and structural anisotropy, haven't been extensively explored in the past, this letter presents…
Dielectric materials are critical building blocks for modern electronics such as sensors, actuators, and transistors. With rapid advances in soft and stretchable electronics for emerging human- and robot-interfacing applications, there is a…
Untethered soft robots that locomote using electrothermally-responsive materials like shape memory alloy (SMA) face challenging design constraints for sensing actuator states. At the same time, modeling of actuator behaviors faces steep…
High-performance closed-loop control of truly soft continuum manipulators has remained elusive. Experimental demonstrations have largely relied on sufficiently stiff, piecewise architectures in which each actuated segment behaves as a…
We design, build, and thoroughly test a new type of actuator dubbed viscoelastic liquid cooled actuator (VLCA) for robotic applications. VLCAs excel in the following five critical axes of performance: energy efficiency, torque density,…
We study the power of uncontrolled random molecular movement in the nubot model of self-assembly. The nubot model is an asynchronous nondeterministic cellular automaton augmented with rigid-body movement rules (push/pull, deterministically…
Developing soft robots that can control their own life-cycle and degrade on-demand while maintaining hyper-elasticity is a significant research challenge. On-demand degradable soft robots, which conserve their original functionality during…