Soft Robotic Manipulation System Capable of Stiffness Variation and Dexterous Operation for Safe Human–Machine Interactions

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.

Origami-inspired folding assembly of dielectric elastomers for programmable soft robots

“…These findings have been used to develop intelligent textiles and soft robots that can perceive, interact with and adapt to environmental stimuli. Future intelligent robotic systems will inevitably be controlled automatically 33 , 34 . When combined with intelligent sensing systems 35 – 38 , soft and durable robotic systems can assist humans with long-term tasks through human–machine interactions 39 – 43 .…”

Progress in the Triboelectric Human–Machine Interfaces (HMIs)-Moving from Smart Gloves to AI/Haptic Enabled HMI in the 5G/IoT Era

“…Schematic illustration for the development progress of triboelectric human-machine interfaces and their applications in the 5G/IoT era. Reprinted with permission from Reference [32], Copyright 2021, Wiley. Reprinted with permission from Reference [33], Copyright 2020, Wiley.…”

“…Compared with piezoelectric-based sensors that are commonly difficult for design customization due to the limitation of materials and complexity of the fabrication process [66][67][68][69], TENGs show the advantages of wide choices of stretchable and flexible materials, e.g., fabric, silicone rubber, plastic thin film, etc., and versatile operation modes, i.e., contact-separation mode, liner-sliding mode, single electrode mode and freestanding triboelectric-layer mode [70,71]. Therefore, TENGs have been successfully designed into various structures for different interactions (Figure 1), such as touchpad interface [35][36][37][38]41,72], auditory-based interface [39,73,74], 3D motion manipulator [33,40,42], etc., and can be further designed as self-powered wearable HMIs, e.g., electronic skin (e-skin) [43,[75][76][77], data glove [32,44], wearable band [45,46], intelligent sock [78,79], breath-driven mask [80], etc., for advanced robotic manipulation, IoT control, VR game control/rehabilitation, personal identification and advanced sport analysis, showing the wide application prospects of triboelectric in HMIs area.…”

Smart Table Tennis Racket with Tunable Stiffness for Diverse Play Styles and Unconventional Technique Training

“…[1,2] Soft sensors and actuators shone in fields of soft robots, tactile displays and so on, with tunable stiffness, flexibility, and adaptability. [3][4][5] Many intelligent devices for storage modulus of the elastomer under an electric field and G 0 ′ for storage modulus of the elastomer without applying an electric field) and relative ER effect (ΔG′/G 0 ′) [20,[26][27][28][29] were usually focused. In recent years modified TiO 2 and BaTiO 3 were the most widely studied ER particles of EREs, [27][28][29][30][31] the highest ΔG' is 0.5 MPa with the relative ER effect of around 33%, while the highest relative ER effect is 315% with ΔG′<0.3 MPa.…”