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Abstract Soft robots have attracted great attention in the past decades owing to their unique flexibility and adaptability for accomplishing tasks via simple control strategies, as well as their inherent safety for interactions with humans and environments. Here, a soft robotic manipulation system capable of stiffness variation and dexterous operations through a remotely controlled manner is reported. The smart manipulation system consists of a soft omnidirectional arm, a dexterous multimaterial gripper, and a self‐powered human–machine interface (HMI) for teleoperation. The cable‐driven soft arm is made of soft elastomers and embedded with low melting point alloy as a stiffness‐tuning mechanism. The self‐powered HMI patches are designed based on the triboelectric nanogenerator that utilizes a sliding mode of tribo‐layers made of copper and polytetrafluoroethylene. The novel soft manipulation system has great potential for soft and remote manipulation and human machine interactions in a variety of applications from elderly care to surgical operation to agriculture harvesting.
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This content will become publicly available on January 1, 2026
Thermally responsive spatially programmable soft actuators with multiple response states enabled by Grayscale UV light processing
This work presents a scalable grayscale UV technique for fabricating spatially programmable soft actuators with diverse actuation behaviors in one actuator. The advanced programmability lays the foundation for soft robotics and adaptive devices.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2238363
- PAR ID:
- 10566483
- Publisher / Repository:
- Royal Society of Chemistry
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Materials Horizons
- ISSN:
- 2051-6347
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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