Publications related to Extremely robust and conformable capacitive pressure sensors based on flexible polyurethane foams and stretchable metallization

A multi-material robotic finger with integrated proprioceptive and tactile capabilities produced with a circular process

Antonia Georgopoulou Papadonikolaki, Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Kai Christian Junge

When developing or designing biomimetic robotic fingers with rigid and soft components and integrated sensors, fabrication is often a bottle-neck when assembling and casting processing techniques are used. This study introduces a thermoplastic multi-materi ...

IEEE2023

Thermally Drawn Elastomer Nanocomposites for Soft Mechanical Sensors

Inès Richard, Fabien Sorin, Yunpeng Qu, Stella Andréa Françoise Laperrousaz, Chaoqun Dong, Andreas Leber

Stretchable and conductive nanocomposites are emerging as important constituents of soft mechanical sensors for health monitoring, human-machine interactions, and soft robotics. However, tuning the materials' properties and sensor structures to the targete ...

WILEY2023

Polydimethylsiloxane based soft polymer optical fibers: From the processing-property relationship to pressure sensing applications

Fabien Sorin, Khushdeep Sharma, René M. Rossi

Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) based soft polymer optical fibers (POFs) have recently demonstrated their intriguing potential for different sensing applications like strain or temperature sensing. Recent studies have elaborated on the sensing capability of PD ...

2023

Transient Elastomers with High Dielectric Permittivity for Actuators, Sensors, and Beyond

Holger Frauenrath, Yauhen Sheima

Dielectric elastomers (DEs) are key materials in actuators, sensors, energy harvesters, and stretchable electronics. These devices find applications in important emerging fields such as personalized medicine, renewable energy, and soft robotics. However, e ...

AMER CHEMICAL SOC2022

Advancing the Adaptability of Compliant Robot Controllers for Exploration, Interaction, and Manipulation

Farshad Khadivar

As technology continues to evolve, robots are becoming an intrinsic part of our lives. While robots surpass human capabilities in precision and speed, they are far from matching humans' ability to adapt to unexpected changes. Humans can quickly and complia ...

EPFL2022

Enhancing our understanding of human fine manipulation skills and advancing robot dexterity in grasping

Kunpeng Yao

From surgery to watchmaking, fine-manipulation skills highly rely on the dexterity afforded by both hands. Coordination is key to human dexterity. Specifically, humans need not only to govern the abundant intrinsic degrees of freedom (DOFs) to allocate con ...

EPFL2022

2D MoS2 Nanopores: Wafer-scale Fabrication and Monolayer Stability for Long-term Single-Molecule Sensing

Mukeshchand Thakur

Biologically inspired solid-state nanopores are artificial openings or apertures in thin membranes similar to natural protein ion channels in a lipid bilayer of cell membranes. In solid-state nanopores, a thin insulating membrane with single or multiple po ...

EPFL2022

Stretchable High Response Piezoelectric Elastomers Based on Polable Polynorbornene Fillers in a Polydimethylsiloxane Matrix

Frank Nüesch, Francis Owusu

To advance the field of piezoelectrics, it is desirable to find materials that combine high piezoelectricity with high elasticity. Applications such as self-sensors, stretchable electronics, soft robots, and energy harvesting would benefit tremendously. Ho ...

WILEY-V C H VERLAG GMBH2022

Adaptive Self-Sealing Suction-Based Soft Robotic Gripper

Metin Sitti, Sukho Song

While suction cups prevail as common gripping tools for a wide range of real-world parts and surfaces, they often fail to seal the contact interface when engaging with irregular shapes and textured surfaces. In this work, the authors propose a suction-base ...

2021

Development of soft microscopic implants and acoustically-powered machines for biomedical applications

Murat Kaynak

The development of miniaturized machines that can actively cross barriers, navigate through heterogeneous materials and access remote sites can revolutionize environmental inspection and targeted therapy. Seminal work demonstrated the feasibility of follow ...

EPFL2021

Ultrasoft Liquid Metal Elastomer Foams with Positive and Negative Piezopermittivity for Tactile Sensing

Jianhang Yang, Yegor Piskarev, Yang Li, Michael Dickey

Soft, capacitive tactile (pressure) sensors are important for applications including human-machine interfaces, soft robots, and electronic skins. Such capacitors consist of two electrodes separated by a soft dielectric. Pressing the capacitor brings the el ...

WILEY-V C H VERLAG GMBH2020

Soft and stretchable liquid metal transmission lines as distributed probes of multimodal deformations

Rajasundar Chandran, Fabien Sorin, Nicola Bartolomei, Chaoqun Dong, Andreas Leber

Mechanical sensing represents a key functionality in soft electronics for applications in health monitoring, human–machine interaction, or soft robotics. Current approaches typically rely on intricate networks of sensors specific to one type of deformation ...

2020

Low voltage fast dielectric elastomer actuators

Xiaobin Ji

This thesis contributes to the field of Dielectric Elastomer Actuators (DEAs). DEAs are electrostatically driven soft actuators that are fast, capable of generating large actuation strains, high forces, and present high power density. A wide range of appli ...

EPFL2019

Shared human–robot proportional control of a dexterous myoelectric prosthesis

Aude Billard, Edoardo D'Anna, Nicolas Sommer, Silvestro Micera, Emanuele Formento, Saurav Aryan, Vincent Alexandre Mendez, Francesco Maria Petrini, Fiorenzo Artoni, Katie Zhi Zhuang

Myoelectric prostheses allow users to recover lost functionality by controlling a robotic device with their remaining muscle activity. Such commercial devices can give users a high level of autonomy, but still do not approach the dexterity of the intact hu ...

2019

Bi-Modal Control of Vacuum-Powered Soft Pneumatic Actuators with Embedded Liquid Metal-Based Strain Sensitive Skin

Laurent Mirko Dejace, Stéphanie Lacour, Jamie Paik, Matthew Aaron Robertson

Soft robotic systems are composed of active and passively deformable structures which are intrinsically compliant, flexible, and elastic. Although these features offer benefits of adaptability, robustness, and safety, controlling these types of robots is a ...

IEEE2019

Fully Fdm 3D Printed Flexible Capacitive And Resistive Transducers

Danick Briand, Xavier Aeby, Ryan Mitchell van Dommelen

This work shows the feasibility of fully Fused-Deposition-Modeling (FDM) printed capacitive and resistive transducers, processed in a single tool. It enables their cost-effective processing and provides a simple approach for sensors manufacturing in 3D pri ...

IEEE2019

Delicate yet strong: characterizing the electro-adhesion lifting force with a soft gripper

Herbert Shea, Jun Shintake, Vito Cacucciolo

Compliant grippers are one of the most promising soft robotic devices for industrial tasks. Soft grippers dramatically simplify grasping control because the gripper automatically conforms to the object's shape. A common limitation of soft structures is tha ...

IEEE2019

Variable stiffness strip with strain sensing for wearable robotics

Dario Floreano, Carine Rognon, Jun Shintake, Stefano Mintchev, Alice Tonazzini, Vivek Ramachandran

Variable stiffness technologies help to solve the conflicting requirements of strength, comfort, and safety in soft exoskeletons. Here, we propose a modular variable stiffness strip based on layer jamming as a mechanical solution to constrain users' degree ...

2018

Stretchable metallization technologies for skin-like transducers

Hadrien Olivier Michaud

The skin is not only the largest human organ, capable of accomplishing distributed and multimodal sensing functions. Replicating the versatility of skin artificially is a significant challenge, not only in terms of signal processing but also in mechanics. ...

EPFL2017

Inkjet 3D printing of UV and thermal cure silicone elastomers for dielectric elastomer actuators

Samuel Rosset, Herbert Shea, Samuel Schlatter, David James McCoul

Dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) are an attractive form of electromechanical transducer, possessing high energy densities, an efficient design, mechanical compliance, high speed, and noiseless operation. They have been incorporated into a wide variety ...

Institute of Physics2017