Related papers: Functionally graded keratin facilitates tactile se…
A notable feature of the elephant trunk is the pronounced wrinkling that enables its great flexibility. Here, we devise a general mathematical model that accounts for the characteristic skin wrinkles formed during morphogenesis in the…
One of the key problems in active materials is the control of shape through actuation. A fascinating example of such control is the elephant trunk, a long, muscular, and extremely dexterous organ with multiple vital functions. The elephant…
The elephant trunk exemplifies a natural gripper where structure, actuation, and sensing are seamlessly integrated. Inspired by the distal morphology of the African elephant trunk, we present MELEGROS, a Monolithic ELEphant-inspired GRipper…
Electronic skin, a class of wearable electronic sensors that mimic the functionalities of human skin, has made remarkable success in applications including health monitoring, human-machine interaction and electronic-biological interfaces.…
Humans display the remarkable ability to sense the world through tools and other held objects. For example, we are able to pinpoint impact locations on a held rod and tell apart different textures using a rigid probe. In this work, we…
The logarithmic spiral is observed as a common pattern in several living beings across kingdoms and species. Some examples include fern shoots, prehensile tails, and soft limbs like octopus arms and elephant trunks. In the latter cases,…
In humans, the tactile perception of fine textures (spatial scale <200 micrometers) is mediated by skin vibrations generated as the finger scans the surface. To establish the relationship between texture characteristics and subcutaneous…
Aquatic mammals, such as pinnipeds, utilize their whiskers to detect and discriminate objects and analyze water movements, inspiring the development of robotic whiskers for sensing contacts, surfaces, and water flows. We present the design…
Collaborative robots are expected to physically interact with humans in daily living and workplace, including industrial and healthcare settings. A related key enabling technology is tactile sensing, which currently requires addressing the…
The biological skin enables animals to sense various stimuli. Extensive efforts have been made recently to develop smart skin-like sensors to extend the capabilities of biological skins; however, simultaneous sensing of several types of…
Developing deterministic surfaces relies on controlling the structure of the rubbing interface so that not only the surface is of optimized topography, but also is able to self-adjust its tribological behaviour according to the evolution of…
To foster an immersive and natural human-robot interaction, the implementation of tactile perception and feedback becomes imperative, effectively bridging the conventional sensory gap. In this paper, we propose a dual-modal electronic skin…
Pinnipeds like seals and sea lions use their whiskers in hunting their prey in dark and turbid conditions. There is no theoretical model or a hypothesis to explain the interaction of whiskers with hydrodynamic fish trails. The present work…
The tactile sensation of stroking soft fur, known for its comfort and emotional benefits, has numerous applications in virtual reality, animal-assisted therapy, and household products. Previous studies have primarily utilized actual fur to…
As the largest organ in the human body, the skin provides the important sensory channel for humans to receive external stimulations based on touch. By the information perceived through touch, people can feel and guess the properties of…
One way of controlling friction and associated energy losses is to engineer a deterministic structural pattern on the surface of the rubbing parts (i.e., texture engineering). Custom texturing enhances the quality of lubrication, reduces…
Tiny flying robots hold great potential for search-and-rescue, safety inspections, and environmental monitoring, but their small size limits conventional sensing-especially with poor-lighting, smoke, dust or reflective obstacles. Inspired…
Soft sensors have continued growing interest in robotics, due to their ability to enable both passive conformal contact from the material properties and active contact data from the sensor properties. However, the same properties of…
A fungal skin is a thin flexible sheet of a living homogeneous mycelium made by a filamentous fungus. The skin could be used in future living architectures of adaptive buildings and as a sensing living skin for soft self-growing/adaptive…
Tactile sensing and the manipulation of delicate objects are critical challenges in robotics. This study presents a vision-based magnetic-actuated whisker array sensor that integrates these functions. The sensor features eight whiskers…