Ultrafast, miniature soft actuators

Polypyrrole Soft Actuators

Soft Pneumatic Actuators for Rehabilitation

Pneumatic artificial muscles are pneumatic devices with practical and various applications as common actuators. They, as human muscles, work in agonistic-antagonistic way, giving a traction force only when supplied by compressed air. The state of the art of soft pneumatic actuators is here analyzed: different models of pneumatic muscles are considered and evolution lines are presented. Then, th...

Biomimetic soft multifunctional miniature aquabots.

Engineered locomotive systems are widespread on the macro scale (e.g., planes, trains, automobiles), yet miniaturized mobile systems are largely limited to the research lab. In particular, integration of specific functions such as sensing or drug delivery into a small robot is a great challenge. The ability to miniaturize parts affecting motion, such as MEMS-based components and electroactive p...

A soft, bistable valve for autonomous control of soft actuators

John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, 29 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, 12 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. Kavli Institute for Bionano Science and Technology, Harvard University, 29 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. Wyss Institute of Biologically Inspired Enginee...

Artificial annelid robot driven by soft actuators.

The annelid provides a biological solution of effective locomotion adaptable to a large variety of unstructured environmental conditions. The undulated locomotion of the segmented body in the annelid is characterized by the combination of individual motion of the muscles distributed along the body, which has been of keen interest in biomimetic investigation. In this paper, we present an annelid...