To improve performance of thermopneumatic soft actuators, which have recently been developed for various industrial applications, we embedded different nanoscale materials into their elastomer bodies. This yields a significant enhancement in the actu...
Soft robots show excellent body compliance, adaptability, and mobility when coping with unstructured environments and human-robot interactions. However, the moving speed for soft locomotion robots is far from that of their rigid partners. Rolling loc...
Liquid-crystal elastomer (LCE)-based soft robots and devices via an electrothermal effect under a low driving voltage have attracted a great deal of attention for their ability on generating larger stress, reversible deformation, and versatile actuat...
Nature offers bionic inspirations for elegant applications of mechanical principles such as the concept of snap buckling, which occurs in several plants. Exploiting mechanical instabilities is the key to fast movement here. We use the snap-through an...
An untethered, soft robot using liquid crystal elastomer (LCE) actuators, onboard power, and wireless Bluetooth control was developed. LCE actuators were thermally triggered using Joule heating and demonstrated an ∼5 N force pull capacity per LCE. A ...
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 ...
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...
The field of soft robotics has attracted the interest of the medical community due to the ability of soft elastic materials to traverse the abnormal environment of the human body. However, sensing in soft robotics has been challenging due to the sens...
Beyond a traditional stimuli-responsive soft actuator that shows a single motion by a stimulus, multidirectional actuation reversal with a single stimulus is highly required in applications such as shape morphing sensors and soft robotics. Liquid cry...
Tunable lens technology inspired by the human eye has opened a new paradigm of smart optical devices for a variety of applications due to unique characteristics such as lightweight, low cost, and facile fabrication over conventional lens assemblies. ...