Publications de Herbert Shea | EPFL Graph Search

Wafer-Level Microfabrication of Zipping Electrohydraulic Actuators for Soft Milli-Robots

Miniaturizing soft robots is often limited by scaling down actuators while keeping high energy density and good response time. In this work we demonstrate the wafer-level microfabrication of electrostatic zipping soft actuators, similar to peano-HASELs. Th ...

IEEE2025

Electroadhesion Suction Cups

Herbert Shea

Suction cups are the light bulbs of robotics and automation. They are simple, reliable, yet energy-hungry, and require a bulky and noisy vacuum infrastructure. This work reports Electroadhesion (EA) Suction Cups: soft, silent, monolithic, electrically-driv ...

WILEY-V C H VERLAG GMBH2025

Highly agile flat swimming robot

Herbert Shea, Karen Ann J Mulleners, Mrudhula Baskaran

Navigating and exploring the surfaces of bodies of water allow swimming robots to perform a range of measurements while efficiently communicating and harvesting energy from the Sun. Such environments are often highly unstructured and cluttered with plant m ...

AMER ASSOC ADVANCEMENT SCIENCE2025

Additive Manufacturing of Stretchable Zipping Electrostatic Actuators through Spray Encapsulation of a Frozen Liquid

Herbert Shea, Giulio Grasso

The fabrication of soft fluid-filled systems with mm or sub-mm scale features such as tuneable lenses, microfluidic tactile sensors, and electrohydraulic zipping actuators often relies on manual filling. This final step of injecting fluid limits throughput ...

Wiley2025

Clutchable Fabric Actuator for Energy-Efficient Wearable Robots

Herbert Shea

Energy-efficient yet energy-dense soft actuators are essential for untethered wearable robots. This work reports a fabric-like actuator, combining shape memory alloy (SMA) springs and electrostatic clutches (ESClutches). The SMA springs provide high force ...

2024

Actuating droplets with electrowetting: Force and dynamics

Herbert Shea, Robert Marius Hennig

Electrowetting on dielectric (EWOD) allows rapid movement of liquid droplets on a smooth surface, with applications ranging from lab-on-chip devices to micro-actuators. The in-plane force on a droplet is a key indicator of EWOD performance. This force has ...

2024

Soft Monolithic Shielded Sensors to Measure Shear and Normal Forces for Local Slip Detection

Herbert Shea, Krishna Manaswi Digumarti, Bekir Aksoy

Soft force sensors enable closed loop control or autonomous operation of compliant robot systems. A stretchable force sensing surface containing an array of independent sensor units is reported. This design allows for the measurement of local shear and nor ...

Wiley2024

Permanently magnetized elastomer rotating actuator using traveling waves

Herbert Shea

We report a soft actuator that generates continuous rotation of an object placed on it by electromagnetically exciting circular travelling waves in a soft disk. The disk, that serves as the stator, is made of a stretchable composite consisting of segments ...

Iop Publishing Ltd2024

PopTouch: A Submillimeter Thick Dynamically Reconfigured Haptic Interface with Pressable Buttons

Herbert Shea, Amir Firouzeh, Ayana Mizutani

The interactions with touchscreens rely heavily on vision: The virtual buttons and virtual sliders on a touchscreen provide no mechanical sense of the object they seek to represent. This work presents PopTouch: a 500 mu m thick flexible haptic display that ...

Wiley-V C H Verlag Gmbh2023

Electroadhesive gripping system and method for gripping an object

Herbert Shea, Krishna Manaswi Digumarti, Vito Cacucciolo

An electroadhesive gripping system and a method for gripping and manipulating an object are disclosed. The invention provides a novel approach particularly useful to pick fabrics or otherwise flat and flexible objects including a method relying on electroa ...

2023

Hydraulically Amplified Electrostatic Taxels (HAXELs) for Full Body Haptics

Herbert Shea, Edouard Franck Vincent Gustave Leroy

The ability to mechanically stimulate touch receptors over the entire body is a key feature for fully immersive and highly realistic virtual reality experience. Haptic stickers, flexible arrays of HAXELs (hydraulically amplified TAXels), that enable cutane ...

Wiley2023

Electrode Impact on the Electrical Breakdown of Dielectric Elastomer Thin Films

Herbert Shea, Fabio Beco Albuquerque

Dielectric Elastomer Actuators (DEAs) enable the realization of energy-efficient and compact actuator systems. DEAs operate at the kilovolt range with typically microampere-level currents and hence minimize thermal losses in comparison to low voltage/high ...

MDPI2023

Research data supporting 'Fiber pumps for wearable fluidic systems'

Herbert Shea, Vito Cacucciolo, Michael James Henry Smith

The dataset supporting 'Fiber pumps for wearable fluidic systems', published in Science in March 2023. In this work, we present a fluidic pump in the form of a flexible and stretchable tube. These tubes - or 'fiber pumps' - can generate significant fluidic ...

2023

Fiber pumps for wearable fluidic systems

Herbert Shea, Vito Cacucciolo, Michael James Henry Smith

Incorporating pressurized fluidic circuits into textiles can enable muscular support, thermoregulation, and haptic feedback in a convenient wearable form factor. However, conventional rigid pumps, with their associated noise and vibration, are unsuitable f ...

American Association for the Advancement of Science2023

Fully 3D-Printed, Stretchable, and Conformable Haptic Interfaces

Herbert Shea, Giulio Grasso

Integrating rich cutaneous haptic feedback enhances realism and user immersion in virtual and augmented reality settings. One major challenge is providing accurately localized cutaneous stimuli on fingertips without interfering with the user's dexterity. T ...

WILEY-V C H VERLAG GMBH2023

Dynamic control of high-voltage actuator arrays by light-pattern projection on photoconductive switches

Herbert Shea, Amir Firouzeh, Vesna Bacheva, Edouard Franck Vincent Gustave Leroy, Aiste Balciunaite

The ability to control high-voltage actuator arrays relies, to date, on expensive microelectronic processes or on individual wiring of each actuator to a single off-chip high-voltage switch. Here we present an alternative approach that uses on-chip photoco ...

SPRINGERNATURE2023

Measuring electro-adhesion pressure before and after contact

Herbert Shea, Sylvain Thomas Schaller

Electro-adhesion (EA) is a low-power, tunable, fast and reversible electrically-controlled adhesion method, effective on both conducting and insulating objects. Typically, only the electro-adhesive detachment force, i.e., the force required to separate an ...

Nature Portfolio2023

Slip Anticipation for Grasping Deformable Objects Using a Soft Force Sensor

Dario Floreano, Herbert Shea, Krishna Manaswi Digumarti, Bekir Aksoy, Euan John Kenneth Judd

Robots using classical control have revolutionised assembly lines where the environment and manipulated objects are restricted and predictable. However, they have proven less effective when the manipulated objects are deformable due to their complex and un ...

2022

Peeling in electroadhesion soft grippers

Herbert Shea, Vito Cacucciolo

Electroadhesion endows robots with super-human abilities: mechanical geckoes that climb vertical walls and soft grippers that grasp the most delicate objects. Based on electrostatics, the adhesion forces are turned on and off by an electrical signal, promi ...

ELSEVIER2022

Photoconductive Switching Of A High-Voltage Actuator Array

Herbert Shea, Edouard Franck Vincent Gustave Leroy

We present a method to control individual high-voltage actuators in an array using microfabricated photoconductive switches and a light projection system, thus overcoming the challenges of on-chip control at high voltages. Such switching capabilities go be ...

IEEE2022