The images captured by vision-based tactile sensors carry information about high-resolution tactile fields, such as the distribution of the contact forces applied to their soft sensing surface. However, extracting the information encoded in the images is challenging and often addressed with learning-based approaches, which generally require a large amount of training data. This article proposes a strategy

The terrain adaptability of the state-of-the-art robot is far behind natural animals, partly because of limited sensing, intelligence, controlling, and actuating ability. One possible solution is to explore the flexible locomotion structure and locomotion mode with good adaptability and fault tolerance. Based on this idea, we presented a type of vibro-bot with arrayed soft legs (VBASL) with excellent

Origami-inspired robots are of particular interest due to their potential for rapid and accessible design and fabrication of elegant designs and complex functionalities through cutting and folding of flexible two-dimensional sheets or even strings, that is, printable manufacturing. Yet, origami robots still require bulky rigid components or electronics for actuation and control to accomplish tasks

Soft robots can provide advantages for medical interventions given their low cost and their ability to change shape and safely apply forces to tissue. This article explores the potential for their use for endoscopically-guided balloon dilation procedures in the airways. A scalable robot design based on balloon catheter technology is proposed, which is composed of five balloons together with a tip-mounted

Soft robotic hands provide better safety and adaptability than rigid robotic hands. Furthermore, a multijointed structure that imitates the movement of a human hand represents significant progress in realizing its anthropomorphism. In this study, we present a multijointed pneumatic soft anthropomorphic hand that is capable of expressing letters through sign language and grasping different objects using

Flexible robotics are capable of achieving various functionalities by shape morphing, benefiting from their compliant bodies and reconfigurable structures. In this study, we construct and study a class of origami springs generalized from the known interleaved origami spring, as promising candidates for shape morphing in flexible robotics. These springs are found to exhibit nonlinear stretch-twist coupling

Nature has plenty of imitable examples of bistable thin structures that can actuate in response to mechanical and environmental stimuli, such as touch, light, and moisture. Scientists and engineers have used these as models to develop real-world systems with enhanced shape stability, energy efficiency, and power output. The bistable leaf of the Venus Flytrap (VFT) has a uniquely simple structure that

Numerous recent advances in robotics have been inspired by the biological principle of tensile integrity—or “tensegrity”—to achieve remarkable feats of dexterity and resilience. Tensegrity robots contain compliant networks of rigid struts and soft cables, allowing them to change their shape by adjusting their internal tension. Local rigidity along the struts provides support to carry electronics and

This work reports on a soft gripper with three-dimensional (3D) printed soft monolithic fingers that seamlessly incorporate pneumatic touch sensing chambers (pTSCs) for real-time pressure/force control to grasp objects with varying stiffness (i.e., soft, compliant, and rigid objects). The fingers of the soft gripper were 3D printed simultaneously along with the pTSC, without requiring support materials

Compared with traditional rigid grippers, soft grippers are made of lightweight and soft materials and have the characteristics of flexible contact and strong adaptability, which are widely utilized to grasp fragile objects with complex contours and shapes. In this article, we design and fabricate a three-fingered stiffness-tunable soft gripper by integrating the joint-tuning capability. The soft fingers

Biomimicry of the stomach's peristaltic contractions can be challenging in the design, modeling, and control of a soft actuator. The mimicking of organ contractions advances our knowledge of the digestive system and analyzes the biological behavior by testing with a physical robot. This article proposes a ring-shaped soft pneumatic actuator (RiSPA) as a segment of the digestive tract. RiSPA is made

Many types of novel stretchable and conductive materials have been developed, but all exhibit a large increase in resistance upon stretching. In this article, the design and fabrication methods of two types of electromechanical metamaterials are presented, where the first has an invariant electrical resistance and the second has a decreasing electrical resistance upon elongation. The metamaterials

Actively reconfigurable flexible electronics enabled by robotic technologies would provide opportunities to extensively broaden the application areas of flexible electronics compared with their passively flexible counterparts. Diverse reconfigurable shapes can be enabled by localized control of the film-type electronics while keeping a thin form factor for flexible electronics. The flexible electronics

Emerging worm-like soft robots with various soft materials and different actuation mechanism have been frequently discussed. It is very challenging for soft robots in realizing a fast and untethered crawling. In this article, a biomimetic magnet embedded worm-like robot (shorted as “MagWorm”) in the size of centimeter level is designed and investigated. The actuation of the MagWorm is achieved by housing

Pressurization of gas within embedded channels and cavities is a popular method for actuating soft robots. Various previous works examined the effects of internal fluid mechanics on this actuation approach, as well as on leveraging viscous effects to extend the capabilities of soft robots. However, no existing works studied the combined effects of fluid viscosity and compressibility, relevant to miniaturized

Tensegrity robots comprising solid rods connected by tensile cables are of interest due to their flexible and robust nature, which potentially makes them suitable for uneven and unpredictable environments where traditional robots often struggle. Much progress has been made toward attaining locomotion with tensegrity robots. However, measuring the shape of a dynamic tensegrity without the use of external

Pneumatically driven soft robotic grippers have been extensively studied in recent years. A majority of the grippers, especially those entirely composed of soft materials, can adapt to and handle various objects. However, there are limited studies regarding the realization of arbitrary grasping postures and twisting manipulation. Furthermore, the handling efficiency or the takt time of a handling task

Soft material actuation is a promising field that can potentially solve several limitations of traditional robotic systems. These systems comprise soft and flexible materials to achieve high degrees of freedom and compliance with their surroundings. One method to actuate such structures is to vaporize liquid that is embedded inside the soft material. The soft elastomers are inflated since the generated

Owing to their compliance, lightweight, and high force density characteristics, pneumatic actuation systems have been widely implemented in various soft robots. However, pneumatic actuation systems exhibit low efficiency, poor control performance, and high noise; these make it extremely challenging to widely employ a pneumatic actuation system in mobile robots. To overcome these limitations, many researches

The compliant nature of soft fingers allows for safe and dexterous manipulation of objects by humans in an unstructured environment. A soft prosthetic finger design with tactile sensing capabilities for texture discrimination and subsequent sensory stimulation has the potential to create a more natural experience for an amputee. In this work, a pneumatically actuated soft biomimetic finger is integrated

In this work, we present an injection molded soft total artificial heart (sTAH) produced from high-temperature vulcanizing silicone using an industrial metal injection mold. At 60 beats per minute, the sTAH exhibited a total cardiac output of over 16 L/min against physiological pressures on a mock circulation and was pumped continuously for 110,000 actuation cycles. Finite element analysis was used

Bringing tactile sensation to robotic hands will allow for more effective grasping, along with a wide range of benefits of human-like touch. Here, we present a three-dimensional-printed, three-fingered tactile robot hand comprising an OpenHand ModelO customized to house a TacTip soft biomimetic tactile sensor in the distal phalanx of each finger. We expect that combining the grasping capabilities of

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 locomotion can provide a promising solution for developing high-speed robots. Based on different rolling mechanisms, three rolling soft robot (RSR) prototypes

Artificial tactile sensing for robots is a counterpart to the human sense of touch, serving as a feedback interface for sensing and interacting with the environment. A vision-based tactile sensor has emerged as a novel and advantageous branch of artificial tactile sensors. Compared with conventional tactile sensors, vision-based tactile sensors possess stronger potential thanks to acquiring multimodal

This study presents a multimaterial topology optimization method for design of multimaterial compliant mechanisms. Traditionally, the objective function in topology optimization for design of structures is to minimize the strain energy (SE). For synthesis of compliant mechanisms, the objective function is usually to maximize the mutual potential energy (MPE). To design an adaptive compliant gripper

Research on soft artificial muscles (SAMs) is rapidly growing, both in developing new actuation ideas and improving existing structures with multifunctionality. The human body has more than 600 muscles that drive organs and joints to achieve desired functions. Inspired by the human muscles, this article presents a new type of SAM fiber formed from twisting and braiding soft hydraulic filament artificial

Helical curling and spiral structure are very common in nature, which inspire researchers to create various forms of helical configurations and actuators. The helically deformable actuators perform asymmetric deformations and show different chirality, which means that they can be left handed or right handed. However, the mechanism of helical curling and especially how the key factors influence the

Soft robots are utilized in various operations such as rehabilitation, manipulation, and locomotion. These robots are sometimes excited by means of rubber based bending actuators, which are highly nonlinear and hyperelastic. In addition, in contrast to robots with rigid links and common actuators, continuous deformation of soft bending actuators in the presence of external forces makes the modeling

A modular actuator construction consisting of smaller articulating units in series was designed to construct soft pneumatic actuators. These units are constructed to have a preferential bending direction using Mold Star 15 and Smooth-Sil 950 silicone. By changing the orientation of each unit, a different deformed actuator shape can be achieved. A design tool was developed where a genetic algorithm

Soft pneumatic actuators (SPAs) are customizable and conformable devices that enable desired motions in soft robots. Interactions with the environment or handling during their fabrication could introduce defects into SPAs that affect their performance. These defects could lead to high-stress concentrations in the SPA body and heterogeneous, unrepeatable, or inconsistent expansion affecting their reliability

Continuum robots with redundant degrees of freedom and postactuated devices are suitable for application in aerospace, nuclear facilities, and other narrow and multiobstacle special environments. The development of a snake-inspired continuum robot is presented in this study. The morphological skeleton structure of the snake body is simulated using underactuated continuum joints, which include several

Soft robots characterize operational safety due to inherent compliance from their soft mechanism, whereas their mechanism enhances the difficulty in accurate closed-loop control. To explore their applicability in manipulation tasks, in this article, we propose a visual servoing pushing controller considering the effect of contact. The controller is designed to simultaneously complete the positioning

Medical palpation is a diagnostic technique in which physicians use the sense of touch to manipulate the soft human tissue. This can be done to enable the diagnosis of possibly life-threatening conditions, such as cancer. Palpation is still poorly understood because of the complex interaction dynamics between the practitioners' hands and the soft human body. To understand this complex of soft body

We introduce a novel in-home hand rehabilitation system for monitoring hand motions and assessing grip forces of stroke patients. The overall system is composed of a sensing device and a computer vision system. The sensing device is a lightweight cylindrical object for easy grip and manipulation, which is covered by a passive sensing layer called “Smart Skin.” The Smart Skin is fabricated using soft

Having accurate data to represent hyperelastic materials that underpin soft robotics would facilitate their analysis, design, and validation. We seek to provide the reader with a useful tool to overcome a mundane but crucially important problem in determining the hyperelastic material properties. We show how to employ first dimensionless and then dimensional comparisons between experimental data and

Continuum robot arms, with their hyper-redundant continuously deformable bodies, show great promise in applications deemed impossible for traditional rigid robot arms with discrete links and joints, such as navigating tight corners without getting stuck. However, existing continuum robots suffer from excessive twisting when subjected to offset loading, even resulting from their own body weight, which

Bending soft robots must be structured and predictable to be used in applications such as a grasping hand. We developed soft robot fingers with embedded bones to improve the performance of a puppetry robot with haptic feedback. The manufacturing process for bone-inspired soft robots is described, and two mathematical models are reported: one to predict the stiffness and natural frequency of the robot

Soft robotic systems are well suited for developing devices for biomedical applications. A bio-mimicking robotic soft esophagus (RoSE) is developed as an in vitro testing device of endoprosthetic stents for dysphagia management. Endoprosthetic stent placement is an immediate and cost-effective therapy for dysphagia caused by malignant esophageal strictures from esophageal cancer. However, later stage

Cephalopods could simultaneously achieve both accurate positioning and agile bodily maneuvers by coordinating the mantle and the funnel, which is ideal for underwater robotic applications toward a compact propulsor with combined thrust vectoring and regulation. For a wide range of underwater applications from videography to manipulation, this novel approach would offer a compact and integrated alternative

Pathological tremor is a kind of movement disorder that affects a wide range of patients with Parkinson's disease and essential tremor. Different from available clinical treatments for tremor, including drug and surgery therapy, a novel soft exoskeleton for tremor suppression (SETS) based on assistive technologies is proposed in this study. The SETS system is equipped with a controllable flexible semiactive

Traditional actuators, such as motors as well as hydraulic or pneumatic artificial muscles, demonstrate excessive noise, a heavy weight, and a large size, which limit their practical application in many areas. Therefore, for many decades, scientists have worked to develop new types of silent, small, and light actuators. In this article, a novel soft actuator (actuator3) with a high load-to-weight ratio

Pneu-net soft actuators, consisting of pneumatic networks of small chambers embedded in elastomeric structures, are particularly promising candidates in the society of soft robotics. However, there are few studies on the analytical modeling of pneu-net soft actuators, especially in the three-dimensional space. In this article, based on the minimum potential energy method and the continuum rod theory

Deformation behavior of soft pneumatic actuators (SPAs) can mechanically be preprogrammed into their architecture during design. To date, the majority of SPAs rely on a unimodal bending design. This paper develops a method of including a bimodal design into the deformed state by means of a bilinear material that replaces the conventional strain limiter. With a simple increase in pneumatic pressure

Earthworm-like peristaltic locomotion has been implemented in >50 robots, with many potential applications in otherwise inaccessible terrain. Design guidelines for peristaltic locomotion have come from observations of biology, but robots have empirically explored different structures, actuators, and control waveform shapes than those observed in biological organisms. In this study, we suggest a template

Soft and stretchable sensors are essential to the development of electronic skin, especially their potential applications in health care and intelligent robots, which have increasingly attracted attentions. Herein, inspired by the epidermal tissue hierarchy, we propose a high-sensitivity fully soft capacitive pressure sensor with bionic spine–pillar microstructure. Benefiting from the combination of

Geometrically multifunctional structures inspired by nature can address the challenges in the development of soft robotics. A bioinspired structure based on origami and kirigami can significantly enhance the stretchability and reliability of soft robots. This study proposes a novel structure with individual, overlapping units, similar to snake scales that can be used to construct shape-morphing batteries

The human hand is one of the most complex and compact grippers that has arisen as a product of natural genetic engineering; it is highly versatile, as it handles power and precision tasks. Since proper contact points and force directions are required to ensure versatility and secure a stable grip on an object, there must be a large workspace and controllable tip force directions for the digits. Although

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. The fast-growing demands for tunable optical lenses in consumer electronics, medical diagnostics, and optical communications require the lens to have a

This work presents a unique approach to the design, fabrication, and characterization of paper-based origami robotic systems consisting of stackable pneumatic actuators. These paper-based actuators (PBAs) use materials with high elastic modulus-to-mass ratios, accordion-like structures, and direct coupling with pneumatic pressure for extension and bending. The study contributes to the scientific and

Biorobotics is increasingly attracting engineers worldwide, due to the high impact this field can have on the society. Biorobotics aims at imitating or taking inspiration from mechanisms and strategies evolved by animals, including their locomotion abilities in real scenarios, such as swimming, running, crawling, and flying. However, the development of skin-mimicking structures, allowing protection

Lung cancer is one of the deadliest forms of cancers and is often diagnosed by performing biopsies with the use of a bronchoscope. However, this diagnostic procedure is limited in ability to explore deep into the periphery of the lung where cancer can remain undetected. In this study, we present design, modeling, fabrication, and testing of a one degree of freedom soft robot with integrated diagnostic

The compliance and deformability of soft robotics allow human–machine interactions in a safe manner without the need of sophisticated control systems inherent in rigid-body robotic devices. However, these advantages introduce controllability and predictability challenges. In this study, we propose a novel fluidic-driven variable stiffness revolute joint (VSRJ) based on hybrid soft-rigid approach to

A compliant three-dimensional (3D)-printed soft gripper is designed based on the bioinspired spiral spring in this study. The soft gripper is then 3D-printed using a suitable thermoplastic filament material to deliver the desired performance. The sensorless mechanism introduced in this study provides adequate compliance with a single linear actuator for interacting with delicate objects, such as manipulation

Beyond their colorful appearances and versatile geometries, flowers can self-shape-morph by adapting to environmental changes. Nature-inspired artificial systems that mimic their natural counterparts in function, flexibility, and adaptation find an emerging application in mobile robotics. In this study, a novel reconfigurable bionic flower made of petal-shaped bistable carbon fiber-reinforced composites

Soft pneumatic actuators (SPAs) are extensively investigated due to their simple control strategies for producing sophisticated motions. However, the motions or operations of homogeneous SPAs show obvious limitations in some varying curvature interaction scenarios because of the profile mismatch of homogeneous SPAs and specific interacted objects. Herein, a stiffness preprogrammable soft pneumatic

To allow versatile manipulation of soft robots made of compliant materials with limited force transmission, variable stiffness has been actively developed, which has become one of the most important factors in soft robotics. Variable stiffness is usually achieved by a jamming mechanism using layers, granules, or chain structures, through vacuum pressure or cable-driven mechanism due to its simple and

This work demonstrates the first 3D printed wearable motor-sensory module prototype designed for facial rehabilitation, focusing on facial paralysis. The novelty of the work lies in the fast fabrication of the first fully soft working prototype, including feedback control, with a focus on the methodology for individual customization. Facial paralysis results from a variety of conditions, and more wearable

Achieving both high compliance and stiffness is a key issue in stiffness-tunable soft robots. A wide-range variable-stiffness method keeping pure soft characteristic is proposed by bioinspired design of deep-sea glass sponges adopting thermoplastic starch. The stiffness-tunable mechanism is designed through force analysis and optimization of its bionic cellular structure. It is fabricated with load-weight

Sensory data are critical for soft robot perception. However, integrating sensors to soft robots remains challenging due to their inherent softness. An alternative approach is indirect sensing through an estimation scheme, which uses robot dynamics and available measurements to estimate variables that would have been measured by sensors. Nevertheless, developing an adequately effective estimation scheme

Robotic joints are fundamental components in artificial graspers and manipulators, and they are designed to achieve high dexterity to carry out various tasks. Traditional robotic hands are often driven by rigid joints, such as tendons and electric motors, resulting in bulky and complex designs. Soft robotics, composed of flexible and compliant materials, offers promising solutions to mimic the human