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Lightweight, durable textile-based inflatable soft actuators are widely used in soft robotics, particularly for wearable robots in rehabilitation and in enhancing human performance in demanding jobs. Fabricating these actuators typically…
This paper introduces a computational composite material comprising layers for actuation, computation and energy storage. Key to its design is inexpensive materials assembled from traditionally available fabrication machines to support the…
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…
Mechanical metamaterials composed of bistable elements have recently emerged as promising platforms for mechanical memory. Traditional approaches to writing information in these systems typically rely on localized actuation or predefined…
The interaction between elasticity and capillarity is used to produce three dimensional structures, through the wrapping of a liquid droplet by a planar sheet. The final encapsulated 3D shape is controlled by tayloring the initial geometry…
Mechanical metamaterials are structures designed to exhibit an exotic response, such as topological soft modes at a surface. Here we explore single-material 3D prints of these topological structures by translating a ball-and-spring model…
Liquid crystal elastomers contract along their director on heating and recover on cooling, offering great potential as actuators and artificial muscles. If a flat sheet is programmed with a spatially varying director pattern, it will…
Soft robotics has emerged as a promising technology that holds great potential for various application areas. This is due to soft materials unique properties, including flexibility, safety, and shock absorption, among others. Despite many…
Materials showing electromagnetic properties that are not attainable in naturally occurring media, the so called metamaterials, have been lately, and still are, among the most active fields in optical and materials physics and engineering.…
Locomotive robots that do not rely on electronics and/or electromagnetic components will open up new perspectives and applications for robotics. However, these robots usually involve complicated and tedious fabrication processes, limiting…
Mechanical metamaterials are artificial composites with tunable advanced mechanical properties. Particularly interesting types of mechanical metamaterials are flexible metamaterials, which harness internal rotations and instabilities to…
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,…
Soft materials have many important roles in animal locomotion and object manipulation. In robotic applications soft materials can store and release energy, absorb impacts, increase compliance and increase the range of possible shape…
Origami and kirigami have emerged as potential tools for the design of mechanical metamaterials whose properties such as curvature, Poisson ratio, and existence of metastable states can be tuned using purely geometric criteria. A major…
Mechanical metamaterials owe their extraordinary properties and functionalities to their micro-/nanoscale design of which shape, including both geometry and topology, is perhaps the most important aspect. 4D printing enables programmed,…
Soft electrothermal actuators are of great interest in diverse application domains for their simplicity, compliance, and ease of control. However, the very nature of thermally induced mechanical actuation sets inherent operation…
Modular microrobotics can potentially address many information-intensive microtasks in medicine, manufacturing and the environment. However, surface area has limited the natural powering, communication, functional integration, and…
This study explores the use of origami composite structures as active aerodynamic control surfaces. Towards this goal, two origami concepts were designed leveraging a combination of analytical and finite element modeling, and computational…
Flexible robotics are capable of achieving various functionalities by shape morphing, benefiting from their compliant bodies and reconfigurable structures. Here we construct and study a class of origami springs generalized from the known…
An underdeveloped capability in soft robotics is proprioceptive feedback control, where soft actuators can be sensed and controlled using only sensors on the robot's body. Additionally, soft actuators are often unable to support human-scale…