Soft Robotics. Research Concept of Soft-Mechanical Suits.

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...

How Does Soft Robotics Drive Research in Animal Locomotion?

The point of this discussion is to hear from experts about the use of soft robotics in studies of animal locomotion. As early as Aristotle’s ‘‘On the Motion of Animals,’’ scientists and engineers have grappled with questions about movement that still puzzle us today. Seemingly simple questions are not: How do bats fly? How does a jellyfish swim? How does an earthworm crawl? Robotics, and soft r...

The Soft Robotics Toolkit: Shared Resources for Research and Design

This article describes the development of the Soft Robotics Toolkit, a set of open access resources to support the design, fabrication, modeling, characterization, and control of soft robotic devices. The ultimate aim of the toolkit is to support researchers in building upon each other’s work, and thereby advance the field of soft robotics. An additional aim is to support educators and encourag...

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