I am looking for PhD students for my newly founded research group "Soft Robotics for Autonomous Systems" at the University of Stuttgart. The positions are fully funded and include German social security and health care benefits. More information can be found in the attached pdf.
Dear Colleagues,
We just published the comment Shaping the future of robotics through materials innovation in Nature Materials:
Rothemund P., Kim. Y., Heisser R. H., Zhao X., Shepherd R. F., Keplinger C. Shaping the future of robotics through materials innovation. Nature Materials 20, 1582-1587 (2021)
Dear colleagues,
We have published a progress report on hydraulically amplified self-healing electrostatic (HASEL) artificial muscles in Advanced Materials. In this progress report we report the recent developments of HASEL actuators—including materials, designs, fabrication, and control—and discuss many opportunities for future research.
We have discovered two timescales that govern the dynamic behavior of electrohydraulic actuators: a viscous timescale and an inertial timescale, which depend on geometry and materials system of the actuator, and applied mechanical load and voltage. Depending on the ratio of these timescales, the actuators operate either in a viscous regime in which viscous resistance limits the actuation speed or in an inertial regime in which high speed actuation is possible.
Please take a look at our newest paper in Extreme Mechanics letters. In this paper we investigate why Peano-HASEL (Hydraulically Amplified Self-healing Electostatic) actuators zip inhomogeneously at large loads. We develop a theoretical model to explain the phenomenon and validate it experimentally. We show that inhomogeneous zipping increases the blocking force of Peano-HASEL actuators by ~50% compared to homgenous zipping. Even though our analysis is limited to Peano-HASEL actuators, the physical principle is valid for other geometries of HASEL acutators, too.
Journal Club for May 2019: Using Instabilities to Control Soft Robots Philipp Rothemund University of Colorado Boulder
