Designing And Modelling Soft Active Artificial Muscles “Geometric and Material Nonlinearities”

Overview

Abstract

Nature is a source of inspiration for scientists and engineers to design new systems and solutions. To date, science is still unable to unveil the secret behind the tiny complex soft creatures. Can you imagine creating a fly, or even a worm; there are basic compelling questions: Do the tiny soft creatures have a soft brain, how far it is intelligent?; What are the mechanisms behind their agility in locomotion or even hunting likely chameleons? These intriguing questions are still unanswerable by scientists and engineers. We commit to thinking of new soft cognitive materials that have the potential to replace the passive soft materials. The first question we have to ask ourselves as scientists and engineers: is the soft robot is going to fulfill the safety criteria for the human being? Researchers argue how to define the soft robot, for answering a doubtful question, Rus et al have answered this question clearly, that the robot can be classified as hard or soft based on the compliance of the materials.

On the other side, researchers identify a robot that makes continuum deformation as the soft robot, Rus illustrated that not all continuum robots are soft as it is composed of rigid materials. For reaching this goal, we must have rigorous modeling of soft robotics. Miniaturized soft actuators and sensors are important for such an implementation confined environment. There is a need for new soft materials,ionic conductive polymers (IEAP), this material is still complex to understand their physical behavior. One of the imminent IEAP's challenges and trade-offs: is between the mechanical performance and response time. In this talk, we are going to cover the modeling, simulation techniques, how we can use geometric and material nonlinearities to achieve the desired performance, what is still hard to understand, and the missing pieces for closing IEAP's trade-offs.

Brief Biography

Marwa A.ElDiwiny, is the host and founder of IEEE RAS Soft Robotics Podcast and student activities co-chair at IEEE RAS Org and serving at the technical committee of IEEE RAS Soft Robotics TC. She is an early stage researcher Ph.D at VUB, before she worked at Utwente and Inria on modelling and simulating soft active materials. Lately she was named as one of thirty women you should know in 2020 by Robohub.