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Polymeric Biomaterials and Current Trends for Advanced Applications
Published in Anandhan Srinivasan, Selvakumar Murugesan, Arunjunai Raj Mahendran, Progress in Polymer Research for Biomedical, Energy and Specialty Applications, 2023
Vineeth M. Vijayan, Suja Mathai, Vinoy Thomas
In the early phase of soft robotic system development, the focus was to mimic the features of organisms without internal skeletons. This may seem easy but in actual practice they are not as much easy as they appear. For example, the mimicking of the sophisticated movement of a worm is still not easy to replicate. Starfish is one of the commonly employed organisms which are mimicked to form grippers.110 The squid and octopods are other biological organisms whose functions and movements are attempted to replicate.107 The first example of a useful soft robotic device was a pentagonal gripper.109 This design was inspired from a starfish structure; this soft robotic device was found to be capable of gripping an uncooked egg. Soft robotics major application lies in medicine where they can be utilized as assistive devices for healthcare workers, elderly care devices, treatment and prevention of pressure ulcers etc.107 Polymeric material especially elastomeric poly (dimethyl siloxane) (PDMS) is widely used as a structural material to design soft robotics.111 This was clearly showing the importance of elastomeric polymers in this recently developing field of soft robotics. PDMS possess different useful properties such as transparency, ease of sterilization, and biocompatibility which makes them an ideal structural material for soft robotics.111 There are some recent approaches of soft robotics designs based on PDMS which are worth of reviewing.
Introduction to Biorobotics: Part of Biomedical Signal Processing
Published in Krishna Kant Singh, Vibhav Kumar Sachan, Akansha Singh, Sanjeevikumar Padmanaban, Deep Learning in Visual Computing and Signal Processing, 2023
Kashish Srivastava, Shilpa Choudhary
Soft robotics is another part of biorobotics that helps in designing and building robots from uniquely agreeable materials, like the one which are present in human body.38 Soft robotics gets to know in better ways of how a human body moves and get habitual to the environment variations.
3D printing for soft robotics – a review
Published in Science and Technology of Advanced Materials, 2018
Jahan Zeb Gul, Memoon Sajid, Muhammad Muqeet Rehman, Ghayas Uddin Siddiqui, Imran Shah, Kyung-Hwan Kim, Jae-Wook Lee, Kyung Hyun Choi
Smart materials are the active materials that can undergo some observable change in one domain in response to external stimuli through another domain; the external stimuli may be thermal, chemical, mechanical, optical, moisture, pH, pneumatic and electric or magnetic field. Additive manufacturing or 3D printing of smart materials has been an astounding boost for researchers in the form of 4D printing and soft robotics. When smart materials fabricated by 3D printing in a particular shape have the potential to alter their given shape or properties with repect to time under the influence of some external stimuli, this phenomenon is called 4D printing [30]. Whereas, soft robotics is a broad term that includes actuators, artificial muscles, soft stretchable sensors, soft energy harvesting, pneumatic nets, electroactive polymers and soft electronics. The soft robotics is the field of mimicking of a natural organism using smart materials. This artificial organism paradigm has not only mimicked the shape and motion of some natural organism but now it is also going to exploit all the traits of a natural organism. The revolution in 3D printing has accelerated the progress in soft robotics; it involves two types of contributions: direct printing of smart materials, and 3D printing of moulds for soft robotics. We have spotlighted this review with both types of additive manufacturing in soft robotics. Smart materials which have been used in soft robotics or actuators for soft robotics are dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs), hydrogels, electroactive polymers (EAPs), SMAs, shape memory polymers (SMPs) and FEAs.
Modeling and understanding locomotion of pneumatic soft robots
Published in Soft Materials, 2018
Ning An, Meie Li, Jinxiong Zhou
The field of soft robotics has attracted intensive attention and interest in both engineering and academia communities. A variety of manufacturing technologies and large number of prototypes of soft robotics have been developed and demonstrated in the past decade. In sharp contrast to the rapid development of design and fabrication techniques of soft robotics, modeling and control of soft robotics remain as challenging tasks and the research is really scarce. The reasons and the technical difficulties are obvious: the soft robotics are made of soft materials, thus the motion and deformation of the soft robotics is continuous and distributed all over the soft body in response to an applied external actuation. The manipulation of the locomotion of the soft robotics is much complicated as compared with their hard counterparts.
Design and control of a novel variable stiffness soft arm
Published in Advanced Robotics, 2018
Lina Hao, Chaoqun Xiang, M. E. Giannaccini, Hongtai Cheng, Ying Zhang, S. Nefti-Meziani, Steven Davis
The rapid development of robot technology entails that rigid robots enjoy a very wide range of applications. Conventional robots essentially mimic mammals, which possesses rigid links [1]. Due to the limited degrees of freedom (DOF) and main component materials of rigid robot, they also suffer from some disadvantages such as high cost, heavy weight and poor compatibility with unstructured environments. Soft robots enjoy low cost, light weight, softness, simple structure among other advantages. Soft and compliant robots are particularly apt for unstructured environments due to their flexibility, versatility and claims to safety.