Soft Robotics: Matter, Structure, and Intelligence

Organizers

Jie Yin, North Carolina State University

Description

Soft robotics is becoming an emerging research area due to its great potential of safe, adaptive human-machine and environmental interactions. It has recently attracted growing interest from the broad communities of materials, mechanics, sensors, robotics, dynamics, control, and computer science. This symposium invites researches on mechanics, design, modeling, manufacturing, actuation, sensing, and control of soft robots made of different soft actuating materials and structures at all scales. The purpose is to showcase recent advances and outlook for future directions.  Examples of the topics include (but are not limited to): 
   • Robotic matter: emerging soft actuating materials, e.g., ecoflex, hydrogels, liquid crystal polymers, shape memory polymers, magnetic elastomers, and electro-active polymers etc., 
   • Robotic structures and manufacturing: novel structures, e.g., architected materials, origami/kirigami, bistable/multistable structures, tensegrity, and composites etc.,  
   • Robotic intelligence: physical intelligence and materials intelligence for autonomy and intelligence through sensing, actuation, control, and machine learning. 
   • Robotic functionalities: artificial muscle, actuators, locomotion (jumping, swimming, crawling), manipulation, and mechanical computation etc.,  
   • Robotics for a better life, e.g., wearable soft robots, surgical soft robots, and rehabilitation robots etc., for healthcare and medical applications