Seminar Schedule – Spring 2018

Thursday, March 01, 2018
Time: 3:30pm – 5:00pm
Place: WRW 102

Soft Robots Based on Dielectric Elastomer Actuators

Jian Zhu, National University of Singapore

Robots have been proposed to relieve human beings from dangerous environments or tedious manufacturing processes, or mimic human beings or animals in appearance, behaviour, and/or cognition. Most of traditional robots use hard materials. Inspired by natural creatures, researchers recently become more and more interested in soft robots, which are made of soft materials, say polymers.

To exploit animal-like locomotion and behaviour, it is essential to develop muscle-like actuators with properties close to biological systems. Currently we are working on soft robots based on soft active materials. In particular, we employ dielectric elastomers as artificial muscles in soft robots. A dielectric elastomer actuator can deform in response to voltage, and can exhibit unique attributes, including large deformation, high energy density, low weight, low noise, fast response, etc.

In this seminar I will discuss several ongoing projects on soft robots including a worm-like robot, artificial muscle actuators for humanoid robots, and flog-like robot.

For further information please contact Dr. Nanshu Lu at nanshulu@mail.utexas.edu or (512) 471-4208.