Soft Robotics

Soft robotics for chemists.

In areas from assembly of machines to surgery, and from deactivation of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) to unmanned flight, robotics is an important and rapidly growing field of science and technology. It is currently dominated by robots having hard body plans—constructions largely of metal structural elements and conventional joints—and actuated by electrical motors, or pneumatic or hydrau...

The 2015 Soft Robotics Competition

september 2016 • Ieee rObOtICs & AUtOmAtION mAGAZINe • model checking or other formal verification tools. In the months leading up to the competition, the organizers created an open source infrastructure for generating problem instances and interacting with submitted controllers. This included deciding problem specification formats and parameters of each problem domain that would be varied duri...

Soft Robotics - The Next Industrial

Soft Robotics: Challenges and Perspectives

There has been an increasing interest in the use of unconventional materials and morphologies in robotic systems because the nderlying mechanical properties (such as body shapes, elasticity, viscosity, softness, density and stickiness) are crucial research opics for our in-depth understanding of embodied intelligence. The detailed investigations of physical system-environment interctions are pa...

Dielectric Elastomer Based "Grippers" for Soft Robotics.

The use of few stiff fibers to control the deformation of dielectric elastomer actuators, in particular to break the symmetry of equi-biaxial lateral strain in the absence of prestretch, is demonstrated. Actuators with patterned fibers are shown to evolve into unique shapes upon electrical actuation, enabling novel designs of gripping actuators for soft robotics.