5 accepted papers
Electrostatic soft actuators are known for their high power, rapid response, and accessible control. A variety of operational modalities have been achieved in electrostatic actuators; however, torsional movement remains particularly challenging and has been rarely investigated. This paper employs th
State-of-the-art prosthetics use traditional ‘muscle-tendon’ systems to flex and extend fingers. The main consumer complaint is the weight of a prosthetic, aggravated by this complicated mechanism. This letter introduces an electrically zipping bending actuator (EZBA), a soft actuator that fuses str
Actuators are essential devices that exert force and do work. The contraction of an actuator (how much it can shorten) is an important property that strongly influences its applications, especially in engineering and robotics. While high contractions have been achieved by thermally- or fluidically-d…
In this letter, we investigate the viability of capacitance self-sensing of electro-ribbon actuators, allowing them to be used simultaneously as an actuator and a sensor. Initially the electro-ribbon actuator was implemented only as a sensor, and it was found that the exponential relationship betwee
Various physical phenomena have been used to develop variable-stiffness (VS) materials and structures, but all have involved some elements of manual fabrication, which limits their applications. In contrast, here we show fully three-dimensional (3D) printed monolithic VS structures that can be used