Soft Robotics: New Perspectives for Robot Bodyware and Control

By Cecilia Laschi, Matteo Cianchetti. Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology, 2014

307 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The remarkable advances of robotics in the last 50 years, which represent an incredible wealth of knowledge, are based on the fundamental assumption that robots are chains of rigid links. The use of soft materials in robotics, driven not only by new scientific paradigms (biomimetics, morphological computation, and others), but also by many applications (biomedical, service, rescue robots, and many more), is going to overcome these basic assumptions and makes the well-known theories and techniques poorly applicable, opening new perspectives for robot design and control. The current examples of soft robots represent a variety of solutions for actuation and control. Though very first steps, they have the potential for a radical technological change. Soft robotics is not just a new direction of technological development, but a novel approach to robotics, unhinging its fundamentals, with the potential to produce a new generation of robots, in the support of humans in our natural environments.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Condensed Matter Physics, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9c42648e1117ab1e40dbccd4d0d8aa302c613bff

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In Biomedical Engineering

In Condensed Matter Physics

In Mechanical Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Feedback Control of Soft Robot Actuators via Commercial Flex Bend Sensors (2017, background): “Key features of such approach are the large and continuous output deformations performed by soft actuators and the inherent adaptability to different environments thanks to the material compliance [1], [2].”
Soft Manipulators and Grippers: A Review (2016, background): “Soft robotics refers to robots which utilize materials and actuation methods which are soft, flexible, and compliant (Laschi and Cianchetti, 2014).”
Soft robotics: Technologies and systems pushing the boundaries of robot abilities (2016, background): “In (15), soft robots are defined as robots built with soft materials.”
Current status of 4D printing technology and the potential of light-reactive smart materials as 4D printable materials (2016, background): “…found popularity in the automotive (Jani et al. 2014), aerospace (Humbeeck 1999), biomedical (Morgan 2004), robotics (Wu and Schetky 2000, Mazzolai et al. 2012, Jani et al. 2013, Cianchetti et al. 2014, Laschi and Cianchetti 2014), and soft actuation industries (Figure 2) (Cianchetti et al. 2014).”
Soft Robots Manufacturing: A Review (2018, background): “Though soft robotics is a recent scientific and technological topic, a significant number of review articles have already been published (Trivedi et al., 2008; Ilievski et al., 2011; Laschi and Cianchetti, 2014; Majidi, 2014; Rus and Tolley, 2015; Laschi et al., 2016), justified by the exponentially”
Liquid crystal elastomers: an introduction and review of emerging technologies (2018, background): “continuously deformable materials, they effectively have infinite degrees of freedom, making traditional modeling theories poorly applicable [163,176].”