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Antagonistic actuation and stiffness control in soft inflatable robots

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Soft robots promise solutions for a wide range of applications that cannot be achieved with traditional, rigid-component robots. A key challenge is the creation of robotic structures that can vary their stiffness at will, for example, by using antagonistic actuators, to optimize their interaction with the environment and be able to exert high forces.

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Fig. 1: Octopus-inspired robot.

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Acknowledgements

The work described in this paper was partially funded by the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Commission under grant agreement 287728 in the framework of EU project STIFF-FLOP.

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  1. Centre for Advanced Robotics @ Queen Mary, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London, UK

    Kaspar Althoefer

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  1. Kaspar Althoefer
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Correspondence to Kaspar Althoefer.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Althoefer, K. Antagonistic actuation and stiffness control in soft inflatable robots. Nat Rev Mater 3, 76–77 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41578-018-0004-0

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