What is it about?

Soft robots are of increasing interest as they can cope with challenges that are poorly addressed by conventional rigid-body robots. However, there is limited research on the design of modular soft robots for enhancing their reconfigurability. Therefore, this paper presents a design of soft building blocks that can be disassembled and reconfigured to build different modular configurations of soft robots such as robotic fingers and continuum robots.

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Why is it important?

Our modular design of soft robots makes it very easy to assemble various types of soft robots and configurations such as robotic fingers, robotic elephant trunk, crawling worm robot and legged robot. One of the important aspects is that you can assemble, disassemble and reconfigure your own design of soft robot under a couple of minutes. Unlike other soft robot designs that are not modular and require several hours to manufacture only a specific configuration.

Perspectives

Working on this research project was a great pleasure and I hope people start thinking of the capabilities of soft robots and how academic research can solve real case problems in industry and also improve the human life welfare. This research project was funded by Rolls-Royce plc direct fund to the Rolls-Royce UTC, Nottingham (PO Number: 1500-00401149) and the University of Nottingham.

Mohamed G. B. Atia
University of Nottingham

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This page is a summary of: Reconfigurable Soft Robots by Building Blocks, Advanced Science, October 2022, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1002/advs.202203217.
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