Concentration Gradient‐Based Soft Robotics: Hydrogels Out of Water

Out-of-plane ion concentration polarization for scalable water desalination.

We present a scalable, out-of-plane desalination approach using ion concentration polarization. A depletion boundary separates salt ions and purified water into distinct vertical layers. The out-of-plane design enables multiplexing in three dimensions, providing the functional density required for practical application. For membrane widths of 125-200 μm, and applied voltage of 5 V, the energy r...

Soft robotics for chemists.

In areas from assembly of machines to surgery, and from deactivation of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) to unmanned flight, robotics is an important and rapidly growing field of science and technology. It is currently dominated by robots having hard body plans—constructions largely of metal structural elements and conventional joints—and actuated by electrical motors, or pneumatic or hydrau...

The 2015 Soft Robotics Competition

september 2016 • Ieee rObOtICs & AUtOmAtION mAGAZINe • model checking or other formal verification tools. In the months leading up to the competition, the organizers created an open source infrastructure for generating problem instances and interacting with submitted controllers. This included deciding problem specification formats and parameters of each problem domain that would be varied duri...

Soft Robotics - The Next Industrial

Soft Robotics: Challenges and Perspectives

There has been an increasing interest in the use of unconventional materials and morphologies in robotic systems because the nderlying mechanical properties (such as body shapes, elasticity, viscosity, softness, density and stickiness) are crucial research opics for our in-depth understanding of embodied intelligence. The detailed investigations of physical system-environment interctions are pa...