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Our sense of touch is essential and permeates in interactions involving natural explorations and affective communications. For instance, we routinely judge the ripeness of fruit at the grocery store, caress the arm of a spouse to offer…
Artificial electronic skins covering complete robot bodies can make physical human-robot collaboration safe and hence possible. Standards for collaborative robots (e.g., ISO/TS 15066) prescribe permissible forces and pressures during…
Microelectronic morphogenesis is the creation and maintenance of complex functional structures by microelectronic information within shape-changing materials. Only recently has in-built information technology begun to be used to reshape…
Tactile perception is crucial for a variety of robot tasks including grasping and in-hand manipulation. New advances in flexible, event-driven, electronic skins may soon endow robots with touch perception capabilities similar to humans.…
The spider silk is one of the most interesting bio-materials investigated in the last years. One of the main reasons that brought scientists to study this organized system is its high level of resistance if compared to other artificial…
Pimple is one of the most common skin diseases for humans. The mechanical modeling of pimple growth is very limited. A finite element model is developed to quantify the deformation field with the expansion of follicle, and then the…
Materials that respond to external stimuli by expanding or contracting provide a transduction route that integrates sensing and actuation powered directly by the stimuli. This motivates us to build colloidal scale robots using these…
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…
Light interacting with plant leaves undergoes reflection, transmission, scattering, and absorption, which together determine leaf optical properties. Changes in leaf architecture disrupt internal light scattering dynamics and consequently…
Interfacing artificial functional materials and living neuronal tissues is at the forefront of bio-nano-technology. Attempts have been so far based onto microscale processing of metals and inorganic semiconductors as electrodes or…
The synthesis of tactile sensing with compliance is essential to many fields, from agricultural usages like fruit picking, to sustainability practices such as sorting recycling, to the creation of safe home-care robots for the elderly to…
Object properties perceived through the tactile sense, such as weight, friction, and slip, greatly influence motor control during manipulation tasks. However, the provision of tactile information during robotic training in…
Scientific progress within the last few decades has revealed the functional morphology of an insect's sticky footpads -- a soft, sponge-like pad that secretes a thin liquid film. However, the physico-chemical mechanisms underlying their…
Due to the complexity of modeling the elastic properties of materials, the use of machine learning algorithms is continuously increasing for tactile sensing applications. Recent advances in deep neural networks applied to computer vision…
How can dense biological tissue maintain sharp boundaries between coexisting cell populations? We explore this question within a simple vertex model for cells, focusing on the role of topology and tissue surface tension. We show that the…
A wide range of microorganisms, e.g. bacteria, propel themselves by rotation of soft helical tails, also known as flagella. Due to the small size of these organisms, viscous forces overwhelm inertial effects and the flow is at low Reynolds…
Grasping, in both biological and engineered mechanisms, can be highly sensitive to the gripper and object morphology, as well as perception, and motion planning. Here we circumvent the need for feedback or precise planning by using an array…
Suckers are significant for robots in picking, transferring, manipulation and locomotion on diverse surfaces. However, most of the existing suckers lack high-fidelity perceptual and tactile sensing, which impedes them from resolving the…
Nanofibrillated cellulose, a polymer that can be obtained from one of the most abundant biopolymers in Nature, is being increasingly explored due to its outstanding properties for packaging and device applications. Still, open challenges in…
Humidity sensing is important to a variety of technologies and industries, ranging from environmental and industrial monitoring to medical applications. Although humidity sensors abound, few available solutions are thin, transparent,…