Integration, being lightweight, and intelligence are important orientations for the future advancement of soft robots. However, existing soft robots are generally hydrogels or silicone rubber, which are inherently mechanically inferior and easily dam...
Soft robots, made from elastomers, easily bend and flex, but deformability constraints severely limit navigation through and within narrow, confined spaces. Using aqueous two-phase systems we print water-in-water constructs that, by aqueous phase-sep...
This paper presents a flexible tactile sensor with a compact structure based on a piezoresistive thin film and an elastomer for detecting three-dimensional (3D) force. The film contains four independent sensing cells, which were made using a type of ...
Structurally coloured materials that change their colour in response to mechanical stimuli are uniquely suited for optical sensing and visual communication. The main barrier to their widespread adoption is a lack of manufacturing techniques that offe...
Miniature untethered robots attract growing interest as they have become more functional and applicable to disruptive biomedical applications recently. Particularly, the soft ones among them exhibit unique merits of compliance, versatility, and agili...
Functional structures with reversible shape-morphing and color-changing capabilities are promising for applications including soft robotics and biomimetic camouflage devices. Despite extensive studies, there are few reports on achieving both reversib...
Laboratory procedures are often considered so unique that automating them is not economically justified - time and resources invested in designing, building and calibrating the machines are unlikely to pay off. This is particularly true if cheap labo...
Chemistry (Weinheim an der Bergstrasse, Germany)
36046951
The marriage of liquid crystal elastomers with dynamic covalent chemistry can be a new paradigm for the development of dynamic and intelligent polymers with versatile functionalities, which is of paramount significance for many emerging applications ...
Dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) are electrically driven soft actuators that generate fast and reversible deformations, enabling lightweight actuation of many novel soft robots and haptic devices. However, the high-voltage operation of DEAs comb...
Liquid crystal elastomer (LCE) is a promising candidate for actuation in light-driven soft robot applications. Due to the fact that LCE has complex hysteretic nonlinearities, which are highly dependent on the environment, modeling of actuators made o...