Oft Actuator News Today

Smart materials that can actively tune their stiffness are of great interest to many fields, including the construction industry, medical devices, industrial machines, and soft robotics. However, developing a material that can offer a large range of stiffness change and rapid tuning remains a challenge. Herein, a liquid metal variable stiffness material (LMVSM) that can actively and rapidly tune its stiffness by applying an external magnetic field or by changing the temperature is developed. The...

Soft actuators are one of the primary and critical components of a soft robot. Soft robots demand dexterous, fast, and reversible soft actuators that must be able to contract, extend, bend, and/or twist with favorable performance while delivering sufficient output forces. Pneumatic soft actuators are one of the most used types of soft actuators for soft robotic systems since they can be designed with internal deformable hollow chambers that dictate a desired output motion and can be directly fab...

Sometimes, good things come in small packages. Extremely tiny packages such as a microrobot that can pollinate fields of crops, help rescue people, and so on. Researchers at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) are already working on that and they’re making significant progress.