The compliant, continuum, and configurable robotics field in general has gained growing interest in the past years especially with the exciting advances in artificial intelligence technology, [1] which could enable various valuable applications ranging from manufacturing to safety and healthcare. [2,3] Soft robots are of notable interest because, unlike their rigid counterpart, they can easily deform while being mechanically resilient, [4,5] adapt to the outer environment without harm to humans, [6] and finally, enable low-cost manufacturing. [7] For robots to interact with the outer environment and complete tasks, a set of sensors and actuators need to be integrated into the system. Soft robots, in specific, present additional challenges because their sensing and actuation devices are generally highly integrated within the body of the robot and its whole functionality. These challenges become even more critical when the soft robot is scaled down to sub-centimeter size as the sensing, power, and data analysis units are moved off-board. As a result, miniaturized soft actuators that respond to various stimuli and show large deformations in addition to mechanical resilience are crucial. These would be particularly promising for application in artificial muscles, microrobots, and micro-manipulators. [8-10] Active and soft materials are promising for this task as they can be actuated through various external stimuli, such as photons, thermal, magnetic and/or electric field. Such materials range from particles, to polymers (either electroactive or shape memory), papers, fluids, shape memory alloys (SMAs), liquid metals, hydrogels, 2D materials, or a combination of these. [6-25] Nevertheless, some materials can be more suitable for a specific set of applications than others; for instance, materials stimulated by the near-infrared (NIR) spectrum are promising for biomedical applications, whereas sunlight-stimulated materials are suitable for nature-inspired soft robots used in outside environments. Various useful metrics are generally used to assess the performance of the actuators; these include the generated stress and strain, Young's modulus or measured stiffness, in addition to their power, work, energy, and force density. In this Review article, however, we focus on the application of the soft actuators in soft robotics where the reported metrics include mode and speed of actuation (or locomotion), power, voltage, current (of the driving signal), lifting force, and weight among others. In this Review article, different active materials that have been developed and used in soft actuators for soft robotics are discussed and grouped by the stimulus that generates the actuation response as shown in Figure 1. The physics of operation, resulting deformations, mechanical resilience, and their pros and cons are presented with a focus on the applications of the different soft

In this paper, we investigate the read operation of memristor-based memories. We analyze the sneak paths problem and provide a noise margin metric to compare the various solutions proposed in the literature. We also analyze the power consumption associated with these solutions. Moreover, we study the effect of the aspect ratio of the memory array on the sneak paths. Finally, we introduce a new technique for solving the sneak paths problem by gating the memory cell using a three-terminal memistor device.

Flexible and stretchable electronics can dramatically enhance the application of electronics for the emerging Internet of Everything applications where people, processes, data and devices will be integrated and connected, to augment quality of life. Using naturally flexible and stretchable polymeric substrates in combination with emerging organic and molecular materials, nanowires, nanoribbons, nanotubes, and 2D atomic crystal structured materials, significant progress has been made in the general area of such electronics. However, high volume manufacturing, reliability and performance per cost remain elusive goals for wide commercialization of these electronics. On the other hand, highly sophisticated but extremely reliable, batch-fabrication-capable and mature complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS)-based technology has facilitated tremendous growth of today's digital world using thin-film-based electronics; in particular, bulk monocrystalline silicon (100) which is used in most of the electronics existing today. However, one fundamental challenge is that state-of-the-art CMOS electronics are physically rigid and brittle. Therefore, in this work, how CMOS-technology-enabled flexible and stretchable electronics can be developed is discussed, with particular focus on bulk monocrystalline silicon (100). A comprehensive information base to realistically devise an integration strategy by rational design of materials, devices and processes for Internet of Everything electronics is offered.

The microclimate surrounding a plant has major effect on its health and photosynthesis process, where certain plants struggle in suboptimal environmental conditions and unbalanced levels of humidity and temperature. The ability to remotely track and correlate the effect of local environmental conditions on the healthy growth of plants can have great impact for increasing survival rate of plants and augmenting agriculture output. This necessitates the widespread distribution of lightweight sensory devices on the surface of each plant. Using flexible and biocompatible materials coupled with a smart compact design for a low power and lightweight system, we develop widely deployed, autonomous, and compliant wearables for plants. The demonstrated wearables integrate temperature, humidity and strain sensors, and can be intimately deployed on the soft surface of any plant to remotely and continuously evaluate optimal growth settings. This is enabled through simultaneous detection of environmental conditions while quantitatively tracking the growth rate (viz. elongation). Finally, we establish a nature-inspired origami-assembled 3D-printed "PlantCopter", used as a launching platform for our plant wearable to enable widespread microclimate monitoring in large fields.