相关论文: Towards artificial muscles
Passive mechanical response of skeletal muscles at fast time scales is dominated by long range interactions inducing cooperative behavior without breaking the detailed balance. This leads to such unusual "material properties" as negative…
Variable stiffness actuators undergo lower peak force in contacts compared to their rigid counterparts, and are thus safer for human-robot interaction. Furthermore, they can store energy in their elastic element and can release it later to…
The size and shape of a large variety of polymeric particles, including biological cells, star polymers, dendrimes, and microgels, depend on the applied stresses as the particles are extremely soft. In high-density suspensions these…
Electrostatic actuators provide a promising approach to creating soft robotic sheets, due to their flexible form factor, modular integration, and fast response speed. However, their control requires kilo-Volt signals and understanding of…
Functional magnetic composites capable of large deformation, load bearing, and multifunctional motion are essential for next-generation adaptive soft robots. Here, we present muscle-inspired magnetic actuators (MMA), additively manufactured…
Mechanical metamaterials are periodic lattice structures with complex unit cell architectures that can achieve extraordinary mechanical properties beyond the capability of bulk materials. A new class of metamaterials is proposed, whose…
Hooke's law states that the forces or stresses experienced by an elastic object are proportional to the applied deformations or strains. The number of coefficients of proportionality between stress and strain, i.e., the elastic moduli, is…
Soft elastomers that can exhibit extremely large deformations under the action of an electric field are essential for applications such as soft robotics, stretchable and flexible electronics, energy harvesting among others. The critical…
It is highly desirable to discover an electromechanical coupling that allows a dielectric material to generate curvature in response to a uniform electric field, which would add a new degree of freedom for designing actuators.…
The control and task automation of robotic surgical system is very challenging, especially in soft tissue manipulation, due to the unpredictable deformations. Thus, an accurate simulator of soft tissues with the ability of interacting with…
We analyse the deformations of a cylindrical elastic body resulting from displacements in a varying gravitational field.
Soft materials, such as liquids, polymers, foams, gels, colloids, granular materials, and most soft biological materials, play an important role in our daily lives. From a mechanical viewpoint, soft materials can easily achieve large…
In this paper we consider a viscoelastic string whose deformation is controlled at one end. We study the relations and the controllability of the couples traction/velocity and traction/deformation and we show that the first couple behaves…
The design of robots that are light, soft, powerful is a grand challenge. Since they can easily adapt to dynamic environments, soft robotic systems have the potential of changing the status-quo of bulky robotics. A crucial component of soft…
Several new experiments have extended studies of the Casimir force into new and interesting regimes. This recent work will be briefly reviewed. With this recent progress, new issues with background electrostatic effects have been uncovered.…
Pedestrian movements can be modeled at different degrees of detail. While flux models (Predeshensky/Milinski 1971) and cellular automata models (Schreckenberg 2002) give answers to some important questions and are fast and easy to use,…
Soft robotic actuators are safe and adaptable devices with inherent compliance, which makes them attractive for manipulating delicate and complex objects. Researchers have integrated stiff materials into soft actuators to increase their…
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…
The work considers the design of an indirect adaptive controller for a satellite equipped with a robotic arm manipulating an object. Uncertainty on the manipulated object can considerably impact the overall behavior of the system. In…
Active solids consist of elastically coupled out-of-equilibrium units performing work. They are central to autonomous processes, such as locomotion, self-oscillations and rectification, in biological systems,designer materials and robotics.…