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Soft machines are poised to deliver significant real-world impact, with soft robotics emerging as a key sub-discipline. This field integrates biological inspiration, materials science, and embodied intelligence to create bio-robotic…
Dielectric elastomer actuators have become one of the most important smart material transducers in recent times. One of the crucial aspects in this field is the application of bias to find the best operating conditions. The basic task is to…
Magnetic elastomers are appealing materials from an application point of view: they combine the mechanical softness and deformability of polymeric substances with the addressability by external magnetic fields. In this way, mechanical…
Very recently, the construction of twist actuators from magnetorheological gels and elastomers has been suggested. These materials consist of magnetizable colloidal particles embedded in a soft elastic polymeric environment. The twist…
Soft continuum robots achieve complex deformation through elastic equilibrium, making their reachable motions governed jointly by structural design and actuation-induced mechanics. This work develops a general formulation that integrates…
We aimed to use finite element method to simulate the unique behaviors of liquid crystal elastomer, such as semi-soft elasticity, stripe domain instabilities etc. We started from an energy functional with the 2D Bladon-Warner-Terentjev…
Liquid metal (LM) is of current core interest for a wide variety of newly emerging areas. However, the functional materials thus made so far by LM only could display a single silver-white appearance. Here in this study, the new conceptual…
Soft robots utilizing inflatable dielectric membranes can realize intricate functionalities through the application of non-mechanical fields. However, given the current limitations in simulations, including low computational efficiency and…
Legged locomotion is a highly promising but under-researched subfield within the field of soft robotics. The compliant limbs of soft-limbed robots offer numerous benefits, including the ability to regulate impacts, tolerate falls, and…
The complex behavior of highly deformable mechanical metamaterials can substantially enhance the performance of soft robots.
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…
The vision of creating entirely-soft robots capable of performing complex tasks will be accomplished only when the controllers required for autonomous operation can be fully implemented on soft components. Despite recent advances in…
Inspired by the cellular design of plant tissue, we present a new approach to make versatile, tough, highly water-swelling composites. We embed highly swelling hydrogel particles inside tough, water-permeable, elastomeric matrices. The…
Magnetic navigation systems, including magnetic tracking systems and magnetic actuation systems, have shown great potential for occlusion-free localization and remote control of intracorporeal medical devices and robots in minimally…
Incorporating functional molecules into sensor devices is an emerging field in molecular electronics that aims at exploiting the sensitivity of different molecules to their environment and turning it into an electrical signal. Among the…
Soft Robots distinguish themselves from traditional robots by embracing flexible kinematics. Because of their recent emergence, there exist numerous uncharted territories, including novel actuators, manufacturing processes, and advanced…
Magnetic gels and elastomers are promising candidates to construct reversibly excitable soft actuators, triggered from outside by magnetic fields. These magnetic fields induce or alter the magnetic interactions between discrete rigid…
Soft robots have been leveraged in considerable areas like surgery, rehabilitation, and bionics due to their softness, flexibility, and safety. However, it is challenging to produce two same soft robots even with the same mold and…
Liquid crystal elastomers represent a novel class of programmable shape-transforming materials whose shape change trajectory is encoded in the material's nematic director field. Using three-dimensional nonlinear finite element…
Ferrogels and magnetoelastomers are composite materials obtained by embedding magnetic particles of mesoscopic size in a crosslinked polymeric matrix. They combine the reversible elastic deformability of polymeric materials with the high…