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Soft Mechatronics for BioRobotics Laboratory

Soft, elastic and deformable systems with variable stiffness are key factors for safe and effective interactions with physical unknown environments, opening to robots a wide range of application possibilities

SMBlab

Soft, elastic and deformable systems with variable stiffness are key factors for safe and effective interactions with physical unknown environments, opening to robots a wide range of application possibilities.
Soft robotics can show all its potentiality only if all the components of the system are contextually taken into consideration, going beyond even the biomechatronic approach in terms of integrated design.
Several efforts have been focused on the development of new sensors, actuators, batteries and mechanisms that are based on soft, flexible or variable stiffness technologies, but the most has yet to be done.
In particular, actuators represent the real bottle neck, but in the last few years new and promising soft mechatronics technologies are emerging thus offering new possibilities to fill the gap between natural and artificial muscles.