Highlighted News
* The first book / e-book dedicated on the foundations and trends in soft material robotics is published (also available as sixty-eight pages journal article)
* IEEE ICRA 2017 Workshop: Advanced Fabrication and Morphological Computation for Soft Robotics
* IEEE ICRA 2017 Workshop: Innovative Haptic Interfaces Emerging from Soft Robotics
* IEEE ICRA 2017 Competition: Soft Material Robot Challenge
* Call for Paper: Advanced Robotics Special Issue on “Morphological computation in Soft Robotics”. For further information, please read this link.
* PhD and Postdoc position is available at Bristol Univ. For further information, please read here.
* Postdoc position is available at Univ. of Cambridge. To apply for the position, please follow this link.
New Videos
* Apple picking robot uses soft robotics gripper & FANUC 3D vision to safely package apples (Feb 2017)
* Festo – Octopus gripper (March 2017)
* Festo – BionicCobot (March 2017)
* End-Effector airbags to accelerate human-robot collaboration in industrial scenarios (March 2017)
* Building a soft robotic cube (March 2017)
Published Journal Articles
* Related review:
- Soft material robotics (Foundation and Trends, April 2017)
* Soft arm, manipulation, grasping:
- From the elastica compass to the elastica catapult: an essay on the mechanics of soft robot arm (Proc. R. Soc. A, Feb 2017)
- A bio-inspired 3D-printed hybrid finger with integrated ECF (electro-conjugate fluid) micropumps (Sens Actuators A, April 2017)
* Soft locomotion, compliant locomotion:
- The effect of leg compliance in multi-directional jumping of a flea-inspired mechanism (Bioinspir. Biomim., Feb 2017)
- Hybrid parameter identification of a multi-modal underwater soft robot (Bioinspir. Biomim., Feb 2017)
- Effects of stiffness distribution and spanwise deformation on the dynamics of a ray-supported caudal fin (Bioinspir. Biomim., March 2017)
- Experimental optimization of wing shape for a hummingbird-like flapping wing micro air vehicle (Bioinspir. Biomim., March 2017)
- Fast-moving soft electronic fish (Sci. Adv., April 2017)
* Soft sensing, artificial skin, electronic skin:
- Toward modular soft robotics: Proprioceptive curvature sensing and sliding-mode control of soft bidirectional bending modules (Soft Robotics, Feb 2017)
- Palpation force modulation strategies to identify hard regions in soft tissue organs (PLoS One, Feb 2017)
- Evaluation of stiffness feedback for hard nodule identification on a phantom silicone model (PloS one, Feb 2017)
- Simple empirical model for identifying rheological properties of soft biological tissues (Phys. Rev., Feb 2017)
* Soft actuator, flexible actuator, compliant actuator:
- Open-loop control of creep and vibration in dielectric elastomer actuators with phenomenological models (IEEE/ASME Trans. Mechatronics, Feb 2017)
- Study on electric energy consumed in intermittent series-parallel elastic actuators (Bioinspir. Biomim., April 2017)
- Adapting to flexibility: Model reference adaptive control of soft bending actuators (IEEE RA-L, April 2017)
- Force measurement toward the instability theory of soft pneumatic actuators (IEEE RA-L, April 2017)
* Soft robot application:
- Design and energetic evaluation of a prosthetic knee joint actuator with a lockable parallel spring (Bioinspir. Biomim., Feb 2017)
- The ankle mimicking prosthetic foot 3 – Locking mechanisms, actuator design, control and experiments with an amputee (Feb. 2017)
- On intrinsic safety of soft robots (Front. Robot. AI, Feb 2017)
- A fully fabric-based bidirectional soft robotic glove for assistance and rehabilitation of hand impaired patients (IEEE RA-L, Feb 2017)
- Toward transoral peripheral lung access: Combining continuum robots and steerable needles (J Med Robot Res, March 2017)
- Autonomous control of continuum robot manipulators for complex cardiac ablation tasks (J Med Robot Res, March 2017)
* Soft robot fabrication, growing robot:
- The quest for natural machine motion: An open platform to fast-prototyping articulated soft robots (IEEE Robot. Autom. Mag., March 2017)
- The soft robotics toolkit: Strategies for overcoming obstacles to the wide dissemination of soft-robotic hardware (IEEE Robot. Autom. Mag., March 2017)
- Instrumented cardiac microphysiological devices via multimaterial three-dimensional printing (Nature Materials, March 2017)
* Morphological computation, morphological change, self-organization:
- Decentralized control scheme for myriapod robot inspired by adaptive and resilient centipede locomotion (PLoS ONE, Feb, 2017)
- What is morphological computation? On how the body contributes to cognition and control (Artif. Life, Feb 2017)
Popular Articles
- A feel for feline innovation (ASME, Feb 2017)
- Worm-inspired material strengthens, changes shape in response to its environment (Robohub, March 2017)
- Toward printable, sensor-laden “skin” for robots (Robohub, March 2017)
- A biocompatible stretchable material for brain implants and ‘electronic skin’ (KurzweilAI, March 2017)
- This robotic tentacle can easily grasp smooth objects (MIT Tech. Review, March 2017)
- Insects inspire crash-proof drone (Nature Tech., March 2017)
- This strange robotic octopus could soon be working with humans (The Telegraph, March 2017)
- Solar-powered graphene skin enables prosthetics to feel (IEEE Spectrum, Mar 2017)
- 3 squishy medical robots that are as soft as you are (IEEE Spectrum, Mar 2017)
- This hard-to-destroy drone goes from rigid to flexible when it crashes (IEEE Spectrum, Mar 2017)