January 2016

Highlighted News

* Soft Robotics Week 2016 “Trends, Applications and Challenges of Soft Robots”

The 2016 Soft Robotics Week will be held next April 25-30, 2016, in Livorno (Italy):
A week totally dedicated to Soft Robotics, featuring a unique concentration of several scientific, cultural and educational events: the RoboSoft Spring School, the RoboSoft Plenary Meeting and the RoboSoft Grand Challenge, the first outdoor challenge for soft robots. International experts across multiple fields in the scientific community of soft robotics, industrial leaders, young researchers and students, will meet together to show current research activities and technologies and to discuss fields of applications, the challenges and the future frontiers for the field of soft robotics.

For registration and more information visit this link.

*  Final STIFF-FLOP Review Meeting: A great success

STIFF-FLOP held their final review meeting at King’s College London on 11 December 2015 with Project Officer, Dr Michel Brochard. Four new project evaluators from academia and industry offered their expertise, helped to evaluate this project, and share their ideas on future technologies made of soft, stiffness-controllable surgical instruments: Prof. Elena De Momi, Politecnico di Milano, Italy; Prof. Paolo Fiorini — University of Verona, Italy; Prof. Brian Davies, Imperial College London, UK; Dr Patrick Finlay, MediMaton, UK. The STIFF-FLOP consortium was able to demonstrate a fully integrated multi-segment soft robotic system including a stiffening mechanism, distributed F/T sensors and a bending sensor. The team showed a miniaturised multi-segment manipulator which was used to operate for the first time on a human body at the Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology (IMSaT) in Dundee, Scotland in October 2015. As part of the Review Meeting, an exhibition was prepared to display the evolution of the STIFF-FLOP project and other technologies arisen from the project’s vision.

* The submission deadline for Journal Soft Robotics (SoRo) Special Issue “Soft Robotics, The Path Ahead” is extended

The new deadline will be February 22, at midnight Eastern US Time. This deadline will be firm; all submissions received after the new deadline will be considered for regular issues of the journal instead.

Guest Editors: Joshua Schultz, The University of Tulsa; Michael T. Tolley, University of California, San Diego; Yiğit Mengüç, Oregon State University; Bram Vanderborght, Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Please address any questions to joshua-schultz@utulsa.edu

* Soft robotics competition seek entries

The 2016 Soft Robotics Competitions offer anyone with an interest in robotics the chance to design and build their own soft robot using the resources available in the open-source Soft Robotics Toolkit.

New Videos

Control of a pneumatically actuated, fully inflatable, fabric based, humanoid robot. The corresponding publication can be found here.

My robot will crush you with its soft delicate hands!

Popular news – Tale of tall boy: The origin of the inflatable man

Published Journal Articles

* Soft locomotion, compliant locomotion:

* Soft sensing, artificial skin, electronic skin:

* Soft actuator, flexible actuator, compliant actuator:

* Soft robot application:

* Morphological computation, morphological change, self-organization:

* Biological and physical studies:

Conference Articles

Popular Articles