Liquid Metal Logic for Soft Robotics

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...

Dielectric Elastomer Based "Grippers" for Soft Robotics.

The use of few stiff fibers to control the deformation of dielectric elastomer actuators, in particular to break the symmetry of equi-biaxial lateral strain in the absence of prestretch, is demonstrated. Actuators with patterned fibers are shown to evolve into unique shapes upon electrical actuation, enabling novel designs of gripping actuators for soft robotics.

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

Fuzzy Logic for Culture-aware Robotics

In the context of culture-aware robotics, we propose a method for the explicit, on-line mapping between cultural variables and robot behaviour parameters which relies on the linguistic variable formalism, fuzzy clustering and the principles of fuzzy controllers. As a case study, we consider the adaptation of the Human-Robot conversational distance to Hofstede’s cultural dimension of Individualism.