Should robots be stiff to resist external mechanical perturbations or should they adapt to and maybe exploit the interaction with their environments? Soft robotics is an approach to design and develop deformable robots that can comply with, and even exploit, interactions for accomplishing their tasks. Soft robotics is then the use of soft materials or deformable structures to build robots. Though a young field, a wide range of techniques and technologies exist today for designing and building soft robots, including methods for fabrication, technologies for actuation and sensing, as well as control techniques. Together with such technological development, soft robotics technologies enable robot abilities that were not possible before, like squeezing, stretching, morphing, stiffening, growing, self-healing, evolving. They open up new scenarios for robotics, leading towards robots that can effectively and efficiently adapt to their environments and tasks. It becomes possible to pursue applications of soft robots in several fields that range from explorations in unstructured environments to biomedical applications, where a soft interaction with human patients is required.


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    Title :

    Soft Robotics


    Contributors:

    Published in:

    Robotics Goes MOOC ; Chapter : 5 ; 245-271


    Publication date :

    2025-02-05


    Size :

    27 pages




    Type of media :

    Article/Chapter (Book)


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English




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