Dear Katia,
Thanks for this excellent and timely summary of the mechanics of metamaterials for soft robotics. I am new to this area and would like to learn more about it. I hope to hear your feedback on a few questions:
1. What will be the most promising applications of soft robotics in the next few years?
2. What are the size limits of the metamaterials for soft robotics? Since most materials/structures are soft, will they have problems to design large scale structures (i.e., reconfigurable infrastructures)?
3. Many biological structures, including human bodies, are composited structures with hard and soft components. Will new opportunities emerge for robotics with similar integration of hard and soft parts by leveraging the widely studied and used hard/rigid robotics and recent progress of soft/deformable robotics?
4. You described various output can be achieved for some simple input for soft robotics. This poses great challenges in the control schemes. Are the current control schemes in the rigid robotics able to handle the control of soft robotics? If not, what will be the new direction for the development of proper control methods for soft robotics?
Best,
Teng
Dear Katia,
Thanks for this excellent and timely summary of the mechanics of metamaterials for soft robotics. I am new to this area and would like to learn more about it. I hope to hear your feedback on a few questions:
1. What will be the most promising applications of soft robotics in the next few years?
2. What are the size limits of the metamaterials for soft robotics? Since most materials/structures are soft, will they have problems to design large scale structures (i.e., reconfigurable infrastructures)?
3. Many biological structures, including human bodies, are composited structures with hard and soft components. Will new opportunities emerge for robotics with similar integration of hard and soft parts by leveraging the widely studied and used hard/rigid robotics and recent progress of soft/deformable robotics?
4. You described various output can be achieved for some simple input for soft robotics. This poses great challenges in the control schemes. Are the current control schemes in the rigid robotics able to handle the control of soft robotics? If not, what will be the new direction for the development of proper control methods for soft robotics?
Best,
Teng