Soft Components for Soft Robots

Typical robot platforms comprise rigid links with fixed degrees-offreedom, solid blocks of transmission and actuator, and superficial positioning of sensors: they are often optimized for the given design criteria but are unable to execute instantaneous changes to the robot's initial mechanism design. The reallife incidences, however, require robots to face complex situations filled with unprogrammed tasks and unforeseen environmental changes. One of the growing efforts in the field that address such juxtaposing design paradigm is soft robotics: augmentations of “softness” in robots to complement, adapt, and reconfigure to the contingent assignments. Although the "softness" invokes and relates to many facets of robot design in both soft and hardware, this manuscript focuses on describing some critical hardware components. I will present several on going research on actuation and sensor solutions for soft robotics application as well as novel methods and materials for sensor and actuation integration.