Bioinspired soft robots for deep-sea exploration.

The deep ocean, Earth's untouched expanse, presents immense challenges for exploration due to its extreme pressure, temperature, and darkness. Unlike traditional marine robots that require specialized metallic vessels for protection, deep-sea species thrive without such cumbersome pressure-resistant designs. Their pressure-adaptive forms, unique propulsion methods, and advanced senses have inspired innovation in designing lightweight, compact soft machines.

Desktop fabrication of monolithic soft robotic devices with embedded fluidic control circuits.

Most soft robots are pneumatically actuated and fabricated by molding and assembling processes that typically require many manual operations and limit complexity. Furthermore, complex control components (for example, electronic pumps and microcontrollers) must be added to achieve even simple functions. Desktop fused filament fabrication (FFF) three-dimensional printing provides an accessible alternative with less manual work and the capability of generating more complex structures.

Effect of post-curing light exposure time on the physico-mechanical properties and cytotoxicity of 3D-printed denture base material.

Objective: This study investigated the effect of post curing light exposure time on the physico-mechanical properties and cytotoxicity of a 3D-printed PMMA-based denture material in comparison to a conventional heat-cured alternative as a control.

Methods: 3D-printed specimens were fabricated followed by post-curing for 0, 5, 10 or 20 min at 200 W and light wavelength range of 390-540 nm. Heat-cured specimens were fabricated using a standard protocol.

Variable Stiffness Devices Using Fiber Jamming for Application in Soft Robotics and Wearable Haptics.

Variable stiffness actuation has applications in a wide range of fields, including wearable haptics, soft robots, and minimally invasive surgical devices. There have been numerous design approaches to control and tune stiffness and rigidity; however, most have relatively low specific load-carrying capacities (especially for flexural loads) in the most rigid state that restricts their use in small or slender devices. In this article, we present an approach to the design of slender, high flexural stiffness modules based on the principle of .

Electronic skins and machine learning for intelligent soft robots.

Soft robots have garnered interest for real-world applications because of their intrinsic safety embedded at the material level. These robots use deformable materials capable of shape and behavioral changes and allow conformable physical contact for manipulation. Yet, with the introduction of soft and stretchable materials to robotic systems comes a myriad of challenges for sensor integration, including multimodal sensing capable of stretching, embedment of high-resolution but large-area sensor arrays, and sensor fusion with an increasing volume of data.

Design Considerations for 3D Printed, Soft, Multimaterial Resistive Sensors for Soft Robotics.

Sensor design for soft robots is a challenging problem because of the wide range of design parameters (e.g., geometry, material, actuation type, etc.

Soft robot perception using embedded soft sensors and recurrent neural networks.

Recent work has begun to explore the design of biologically inspired soft robots composed of soft, stretchable materials for applications including the handling of delicate materials and safe interaction with humans. However, the solid-state sensors traditionally used in robotics are unable to capture the high-dimensional deformations of soft systems. Embedded soft resistive sensors have the potential to address this challenge.

Scalable Manufacturing of Solderable and Stretchable Physiologic Sensing Systems.

Methods for microfabrication of solderable and stretchable sensing systems (S4s) and a scaled production of adhesive-integrated active S4s for health monitoring are presented. S4s' excellent solderability is achieved by the sputter-deposited nickel-vanadium and gold pad metal layers and copper interconnection. The donor substrate, which is modified with "PI islands" to become selectively adhesive for the S4s, allows the heterogeneous devices to be integrated with large-area adhesives for packaging.