The ability to grab, hold, and manipulate objects is a vital and fundamental operation in biological and engineering systems. Here, we present a soft gripper using a simple material system that enables precise and rapid grasping, and can be miniaturi...
Powering miniature robots using actuating materials that mimic skeletal muscle is attractive because conventional mechanical drive systems cannot be readily downsized. However, muscle is not the only mechanically active system in nature, and the thou...
Small-scale soft-bodied machines that respond to externally applied magnetic field have attracted wide research interest because of their unique capabilities and promising potential in a variety of fields, especially for biomedical applications. When...
Bioinspired hybrid soft robots that combine living and synthetic components are an emerging field in the development of advanced actuators and other robotic platforms (i.e., swimmers, crawlers, and walkers). The integration of biological components o...
Tunable, soft, and multifunctional robots are contributing to developments in medical and rehabilitative robotics, human-machine interaction, and intelligent home technology. A key aspect of soft robot fabrication is the ability to use flexible and e...
Mimicking biological neuromuscular systems' sensory motion requires the unification of sensing and actuation in a singular artificial muscle material, which must not only actuate but also sense their own motions. These functionalities would be of gre...
Robot swarms have, to date, been constructed from artificial materials. Motile biological constructs have been created from muscle cells grown on precisely shaped scaffolds. However, the exploitation of emergent self-organization and functional plast...
Human skin can sense subtle changes of both normal and shear forces (i.e., self-decoupled) and perceive stimuli with finer resolution than the average spacing between mechanoreceptors (i.e., super-resolved). By contrast, existing tactile sensors for ...
Future robotic systems will be pervasive technologies operating autonomously in unknown spaces that are shared with humans. Such complex interactions make it compulsory for them to be lightweight, soft, and efficient in a way to guarantee safety, rob...
Elasticity has been linked to the remarkable propulsive efficiency of pulse-jet animals such as the squid and jellyfish, but reports that quantify the underlying dynamics or demonstrate its application in robotic systems are rare. This work identifie...