Soft Ultrathin Electronics Innervated Adaptive Fully Soft Robots

Soft robots outperform the conventional hard robots on significantly enhanced safety, adaptability, and complex motions. The development of fully soft robots, especially fully from smart soft materials to mimic soft animals, is still nascent. In addition, to date, existing soft robots cannot adapt themselves to the surrounding environment, i.e., sensing and adaptive motion or response, like animals. Here, compliant ultrathin sensing and actuating electronics innervated fully soft robots that can sense the environment and perform soft bodied crawling adaptively, mimicking an inchworm, are reported. The soft robots are constructed with actuators of open‐mesh shaped ultrathin deformable heaters, sensors of single‐crystal Si optoelectronic photodetectors, and thermally responsive artificial muscle of carbon‐black‐doped liquid‐crystal elastomer (LCE‐CB) nanocomposite. The results demonstrate that adaptive crawling locomotion can be realized through the conjugation of sensing and actuation, where the sensors sense the environment and actuators respond correspondingly to control the locomotion autonomously through regulating the deformation of LCE‐CB bimorphs and the locomotion of the robots. The strategy of innervating soft sensing and actuating electronics with artificial muscles paves the way for the development of smart autonomous soft robots.     

Soft gallstone-crushing robots

The current treatment for symptomatic gallstones is primarily surgical, where one of the most general surgeries, laparoscopic cholecystectomy, is the excision of the gallbladder to remove gallstones. However, postoperative site infections are a common health risk. As a result, scientists are investigating non-invasive methods to crush gallstones, but to date there are limited reports on such approaches. Herein, we propose a non-invasive lithotripsy method that uses ferromagnetic, spiny, flexible, and wireless medical robots, that can be taken orally into the human body bio-safely, to achieve efficient crushing of human gallstones. After operating for 30 minutes, a human gallstone of about 1 cm in diameter had been crushed into a pile of powdered gallstone residue by three soft gallstone-crushing robots in a pig gallbladder. The work highlights that our designed soft robot provides a promising pathway for non-invasive treatment of human gallstones disease, which brings new insights for future advancement of soft medical robots.     

Soft Robotic Grippers

Advances in soft robotics, materials science, and stretchable electronics have enabled rapid progress in soft grippers. Here, a critical overview of soft robotic grippers is presented, covering different material sets, physical principles, and device architectures. Soft gripping can be categorized into three technologies, enabling grasping by: a) actuation, b) controlled stiffness, and c) controlled adhesion. A comprehensive review of each type is presented. Compared to rigid grippers, end‐effectors fabricated from flexible and soft components can often grasp or manipulate a larger variety of objects. Such grippers are an example of morphological computation, where control complexity is greatly reduced by material softness and mechanical compliance. Advanced materials and soft components, in particular silicone elastomers, shape memory materials, and active polymers and gels, are increasingly investigated for the design of lighter, simpler, and more universal grippers, using the inherent functionality of the materials. Embedding stretchable distributed sensors in or on soft grippers greatly enhances the ways in which the grippers interact with objects. Challenges for soft grippers include miniaturization, robustness, speed, integration of sensing, and control. Improved materials, processing methods, and sensing play an important role in future research.     

Rubber-Like Soft Lattice Structure for Anti-Ballooning in Fluidic Elastic Soft Robots

Additive manufacturing of lattice structures provides materials with enhanced strength, stiffness, and lightweight properties. While most research focuses on stiff, low-stretch materials like metals and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, herein, the tensile behavior of soft, elastomeric lattice structures is explored. Soft-material 3D-printing advancements have enabled increased usage of directly printed soft robots. Traditional fluidic elastic actuators, however, face limitations due to the ballooning effect of soft polymers, causing potential explosions or leakages. To mitigate this, the study proposes using a soft lattice structure to reinforce soft inflatable robots, thereby reducing the ballooning effect and increasing design freedom. Herein, soft lattices are fabricated using Agilus30 in a Stratasys J735 printer and their behaviors under compression and stretching are compared. It is indicated in the results that lattice reinforcement maintains the soft robot's shape under higher pressure and allows tunability of stiffness with variable internal pressure. The implementation of this method in non-convex soft robots successfully demonstrates its anti-ballooning effect.     

Universal Soft Robotic Microgripper

Here, a soft robotic microgripper is presented that consists of a smart actuated microgel connected to a spatially photopatterned multifunctional base. When pressed onto a target object, the microgel component conforms to its shape, thus providing a simple and adaptive solution for versatile micromanipulation. Without the need for active visual or force feedback, objects of widely varying mechanical and surface properties are reliably gripped through a combination of geometrical interlocking mechanisms instantiated by reversible shape‐memory and thermal responsive swelling of the microgel. The gripper applies holding forces exceeding 400 µN, which is high enough to lift loads 1000 times heavier than the microgel. An untethered version of the gripper is developed by remotely controlling the position using magnetic actuation and the contractile state of the microgel using plasmonic absorption. Gentle yet stable robotic manipulation of biological samples under physiological conditions opens up possibilities for high‐throughput interrogation and minimally invasive interventions.     

Hydrogels for Soft Machines

Hydrogels have applications in surgery and drug delivery, but are never considered alongside polymers and composites as materials for mechanical design. This is because synthetic hydrogels are in general very weak. In contrast, many biological gel composites, such as cartilage, are quite strong, and function as tough, shock‐absorbing structural solids. The recent development of strong hydrogels suggests that it may be possible to design new families of strong gels that would allow the design of soft biomimetic machines, which have not previously been possible.     

Incoherent Soft X-ray Holography

Abstract

A long wavelength extension of coded aperture imaging is considered in the context of a possible application in soft X-ray microscopy. It is shown that zone plate coded aperture imaging extends naturally to longer wavelength applications and this is demonstrated experimentally. For a given source of incoherent radiation and exposure time, it is shown that incoherent techniques produce images with a substantially greater signal-to-noise ratio than coherent holography. Incoherent holography also has substantially reduced temporal coherence requirements. The practical implementation of the technique is briefly discussed.     

Soft Gelatin Capsijle Update

Abstract

The soft gelatin capsule is a relative unknown when compared to more traditional dosage forms. The technology and equipment. needed to prepare the gelatin mass and that. needed to encapsulate the fill material are highly specialized and not readily available. The acquisition of this equipment and technology is not usually economically feasible. The manufacture of soft gelatin capsules has. therefore, developed into primarily a contract manufacturing activity

Because of this. very little is known outside the encapsulation industry of the methods of production, advantages. Limitations, and other attributes of the soft elastic capsule This presentation explains the manufacturing process in order to give an understanding of current topics. Versatility of application. accuracy of dosage. content uniformity product. identification patient, compliance and other. attributes are discused. Consideration is also given to enhanced bioavailability, sustained release. and other innovations utilizing this unique dosage form     

Soft Gelatin Capsijle Update

The soft gelatin capsule is a relative unknown when compared to more traditional dosage forms. The technology and equipment. needed to prepare the gelatin mass and that. needed to encapsulate the fill material are highly specialized and not readily available. The acquisition of this equipment and technology is not usually economically feasible. The manufacture of soft gelatin capsules has. therefore, developed into primarily a contract manufacturing activity

Because of this. very little is known outside the encapsulation industry of the methods of production, advantages. Limitations, and other attributes of the soft elastic capsule This presentation explains the manufacturing process in order to give an understanding of current topics. Versatility of application. accuracy of dosage. content uniformity product. identification patient, compliance and other. attributes are discused. Consideration is also given to enhanced bioavailability, sustained release. and other innovations utilizing this unique dosage form