MEMS

Soft robotics requires and offers rich new opportunities for multidisciplinary collaborations involving organic chemistry, robotics, mechanical, computer, biomedical, and electrical engineering. Research in soft robotics includes soft actuators and sensors, soft material creation and modeling, flexible electronics, control and simulation of highly deformable structures, Biohybrid devices, etc. Dr. Tavakoli’s group in ISR-UC has recently developed a very promising prototype of the “SoftHand”. Inspired by biological systems, this prototype integrates complaint and rigid elements into a robotic hand that can be used both as medical prosthesis and industrial applications. By integration of elastic joints and compliant grasping pads rather than discrete revolute joints, the soft hand showed a very good adaptability to a large number of the objects. SML-CMU is one of the few and the leading labs in the world that investigates technologies for soft sensors, including soft stretchable and tactile sensors. This project launches a collaboration between the Institute of Systems and Robotics of University of Coimbra (ISR-UC) and Soft Machine Lab of Robotics institute at Carnegie Melon University (SML-CMU), in order to foster some areas related to the soft technologies and in particular to move toward development of a fully integrated softhand, that integrates the Soft-MEMS skin into the ISR-Softhand