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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…
The advent of 3D printing has revolutionized many industries and has had similar improvements for soft robots. However, many challenges persist for these functional devices. Magnetic soft robots require the addition of magnetic particles…
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…
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…
Sound can exert forces on objects of any material and shape. This has made the contactless manipulation of objects by intense ultrasound a fascinating area of research with wide-ranging applications. While much is understood for acoustic…
Communication among microscopic robots (nanorobots) can coordinate their activities for biomedical tasks. The feasibility of in vivo ultrasonic communication is evaluated for micron-size robots broadcasting into various types of tissues.…
Bio-inspired soft robots have already shown the ability to handle uncertainty and adapt to unstructured environments. However, their availability is partially restricted by time-consuming, costly and highly supervised design-fabrication…
Soft robots have demonstrated superior flexibility and functionality than conventional rigid robots. These versatile devices can respond to a wide range of external stimuli (including light, magnetic field, heat, electric field, etc.), and…
The emerging new paradigm of technologies, the internet of things, entails a process of device miniaturization to combine several functional components, such as sensors, actuators, and powering elements, in a single individual on-chip…
Magnetic-responsive composites that consist of soft matrix embedded with hard-magnetic particles have recently been demonstrated as robust soft active materials for fast-transforming actuation. However, the deformation of the functional…
The system design and algorithm development of mobile 3D printing robots need a realistic simulation. They require a mobile robot simulation platform to interoperate with a physics-based material simulation for handling interactions between…
Additive manufacturing strives to combine any combination of materials into three dimensional functional structures and devices, ultimately opening up the possibility of 3D printed machines. It remains difficult to actuate such devices,…
Nematic elastomers are programmable soft materials that display large, reversible and predictable deformation under an external stimulus such as a change in temperature or light. While much of the work in the field has focused on actuation…
This work introduces a novel technique for fabricating functional robots using 3D printers. Simultaneously depositing photopolymers and a non-curing liquid allows complex, pre-filled fluidic channels to be fabricated. This new printing…
We develop a method to design tunable quasiperiodic structures of particles suspended in a fluid by controlling standing acoustic waves. One application of our results is to ultrasound directed self-assembly, which allows fabricating…
Modular soft robots combine the strengths of two traditionally separate areas of robotics. As modular robots, they can show robustness to individual failure and reconfigurability; as soft robots, they can deform and undergo large shape…
For most acoustic metamaterials, once they have been fabricated, their operating frequencies and functions cannot be adjusted, which is an intrinsic barrier for development of realistic applications. The study to overcome this limit has…
Pneumatic soft robots are typically fabricated by molding, a manual fabrication process that requires skilled labor. Additive manufacturing has the potential to break this limitation and speed up the fabrication process but struggles with…
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…
True microrobots, in contrast with externally controlled microparticles, must harvest or carry their own source of energy, as well as their own (preferably programmable) microcontroller of actuators for locomotion, using information…