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:
- Miniaturized swimming soft robot with complex movement actuated and controlled by remote light signals (Scientific Report, Dec. 2015)
- Cockroaches traverse crevices, crawl rapidly in confined spaces, and inspire a soft, legged robot (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., Dec. 2015)
- A soft jellyfish robot driven by a dielectric elastomer actuator (IEEE RA-L, Jan. 2016)
- Underwater soft-bodied pulsed-jet thrusters: Actuator modelling and performance profiling (Int. J. Robot. Research, Jan. 2015)
- Hydrodynamics of a robotic fish tail: effects of the caudal peduncle, fin ray motions and the flow speed (Bioinspir. Biomim., Feb. 2016)
- Energetic analysis and experiments of earthworm-like locomotion with compliant surfaces (Bioinspir. Biomim., Feb. 2016)
* Soft sensing, artificial skin, electronic skin:
- Implantable electronics: A sensor web for neurons (Nature Materials, Dec. 2015)
* Soft actuator, flexible actuator, compliant actuator:
- Modeling, design, and development of soft pneumatic actuators with finite element method (Adv. Eng. Mater., Dec. 2015)
- Bi-directional series-parallel elastic actuator and overlap of the actuation layers (Bioinspir. Biomim., Jan. 2016)
- Electrorheological valves for flexible fluidic actuators (Soft Robotics, Jan. 2016)
- Simulation of networked dielectric elastomer balloon actuators (IEEE RA-L, Jan. 2016)
- Soft pneumatic actuator skin with piezoelectric sensors for vibrotactile feedback (Front. Robot. AI, Jan. 2016)
* Soft robot application:
- Magnetic actuated pH-responsive hydrogel-based soft micro-robot for targeted drug delivery (Bioinspir. Biomim., Jan. 2016)
- Soft robotic grippers for biological sampling on deep reefs (Soft Robotics, Jan. 2016)
* Morphological computation, morphological change, self-organization:
- Material witness: Correcting errors in self-assembly (Nature Materials, Dec. 2015)
- Multi-crease self-folding by global heating (Artificial Life, Dec. 2015)
* Biological and physical studies:
- Experimental validation of a nonextensive scaling law in confined granular media (Phys. Rev. Lett., Dec. 2015)
- Simultaneous covalent and noncovalent hybrid polymerizations (Science, Jan. 2016)
- Rigid cluster decomposition reveals criticality in frictional jamming (Phys. Rev. Lett., Jan. 2016)
Conference Articles
- The efficacy of interaction behavior and internal stiffness control for embodied information gain in haptic perception, to appear in IEEE ICRA
- A geometry deformation model for compound continuum manipulators with external loading, to appear in IEEE ICRA
Popular Articles
- When wearable electronics devices disappear into clothes (KurzweilAI, Dec. 2015)
- Resin film and materials developed for stretchable electronics (New Electronics, Dec. 2015)
- Working the angles (ASME.org, Dec. 2015)
- Polymer embedded with metallic nanoparticles enables soft robotics (IEEE Spectrum, Dec. 2015)
- A flexible, transparent pressure sensor (KurzweilAI, Jan. 2016)
- Soft robotic grippers lend a delicate hand in undersea exploration (Gizmag.com, Jan. 2016)
- Hybrid polymer shows promise in self-repairing materials, smart drug delivery, and artificial muscles (Gizmag.com, Jan. 2016)
- Wearable, stretchable memory device to monitor heart rate (The Economic Times, Jan. 2016)
- Shocking! ‘Electric eel’ fibers could power wearable tech (LiveScience.com, Jan. 2016)
- Graphene oxide electronics are hot off the press (Rsc.org, Jan. 2016)
- Smart wearable sensor takes sweat-monitoring to next level (IEEE Spectrum, Jan. 2016)
- Flexible pressure sensors stay accurate even when bent (IEEE Spectrum, Jan. 2016)
- Squishy robot fingers gently tickle deep sea critters (IEEE Spectrum, Jan. 2016)
- Building a nanoscale railroad (ASME.org, Jan. 2016)
- Let’s bring Rosie home: 5 challenges we need to solve for home robots (IEEE Spectrum, Jan. 2016)
- Hands-on with ultrahaptics’ invisible, touchable controls (IEEE Spectrum, Jan. 2016)
- Meet the soft, cuddly robots of the future (Nature – News, Feb. 2016)
- Soft robotic gripper gets a grasp on fragile objects using electroadhesion (Gizmag.com, Feb. 2016)
- Mechanical chameleon changes colors on the fly (Discover Magazine, Feb. 2016)
- Exoskeleton makes robotic roach flexibly squishy (IEEE Spectrum, Feb. 2016)