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...
Electrochemically aligned collagen (ELAC) threads fabricated by the isoelectric focusing (IF) of collagen have previously shown potential in tissue engineering and more recently in the fabrication of biohybrid robot structures. For applications in bi...
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...
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...
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...
Finite element analysis (FEA) has been widely used to study foot biomechanics and pathological functions or effects of therapeutic solutions. However, development and analysis of such foot modeling is complex and time-consuming. The purpose of this s...
Shape-memory actuators allow machines ranging from robots to medical implants to hold their form without continuous power, a feature especially advantageous for situations where these devices are untethered and power is limited. Although previous wor...
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...