Liquid Metal Smart Materials toward Soft Robotics

Liquid Robotics: Smart Fluid Systems: The Advent of Autonomous Liquid Robotics (Adv. Sci. 7/2017)

Distributed Camouflage for Swarm Robotics and Smart Materials

We present a distributed algorithm for a swarm of active particles to camouflage in an environment. Each particle is equipped with sensing, computation and communication, allowing the system to take color and gradient information from the environment and self-organize into an appropriate pattern. Current artificial camouflage systems are either limited to static patterns, which are adapted for ...

Smart Fluid Systems: The Advent of Autonomous Liquid Robotics

Organic, inorganic or hybrid devices in the liquid state, kept in a fixed volume by surface tension or by a confining membrane that protects them from a harsh environment, could be used as biologically inspired autonomous robotic systems with unique capabilities. They could change shape according to a specific exogenous command or by means of a fully integrated adaptive system, and provide an i...

Toward Modular Soft Robotics: Proprioceptive Curvature Sensing and Sliding-Mode Control of Soft Bidirectional Bending Modules.

Real-world environments are complex, unstructured, and often fragile. Soft robotics offers a solution for robots to safely interact with the environment and human coworkers, but suffers from a host of challenges in sensing and control of continuously deformable bodies. To overcome these challenges, this article considers a modular soft robotic architecture that offers proprioceptive sensing of ...

Crops: a green approach toward self-assembled soft materials.

To date, a wide range of industrial materials such as solvents, fuels, synthetic fibers, and chemical products are being manufactured from petroleum resources. However, rapid depletion of fossil and petroleum resources is encouraging current and future chemists to orient their research toward designing safer chemicals, products, and processes from renewable feedstock with an increased awareness...