Synergizing Microfluidics with Soft Robotics

Soft robots are often referred to as robots that are made of soft materials. Their primary advantage over traditional hard robots lies in their collaborative feature when interacting with humans due to their inherent compliance. For example, soft robots are capable of handling soft and delicate objects that could be as simple as un-boiled eggs or as complicated as human internal organs. Major components of a typical soft robot include a control center, soft actuators and sensors. Early work on soft robots was primarily inspired by animals lacking internal skeletons, such as squid, worm and starfish, and ongoing research on soft robots clearly points to applications in biomedical areas such as soft wearable assistive systems for rehabilitation and mobility improvement.

Microfluidics, which was mainly driven by the need to miniaturize the total analysis systems, has contributed tremendously to a broad range of bioapplications such as disease diagnosis, personalized medicine, and virus detection by serving as an enabling tool. There seems to be a synergy between microfluidics and soft robots as they both find broad applications in bio-related areas. Moreover, they share some common technological developments. For example, polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) and associated soft lithography fabrication technology have been primarily used for making both microfluidic chips and soft actuators used in soft robots. Soft fluidic actuators employing hydraulics or pneumatics are commonly used as compared to smart material-based actuators such as shape memory alloy, dielectric elastomers/electroactive polymers, and electro/magneto-rheological fluids, which seem to require more research. Therefore, microfluidics that relies on the fluids in a network of hydraulic or pneumatic channels to function shares the same fundamentals in fluid mechanics as soft fluid actuators.

Soft robotics is still at its early stage facing fundamental and technological challenges requiring contributions from many disciplines such as biological and medical sciences, material sciences, chemistry and engineering. There have been several special issues on soft robots over the past several years, which focus more on the design, optimization and fabrication of soft robotic systems. The high synergies mentioned above do encourage communications between the soft robotic community and the microfluidics community. This special issue aims to provide a platform to stimulate and assist in such communication.

Topics covered include, but are not limited to:

Guest Editors

Carolyn Ren, University of Waterloo

How to Submit:

• Please submit through the online submission system.
• Under manuscript information → Title/Abstract → select “Invited Submission: Yes”.
• Under manuscript information → Manuscript classification → select “Synergizing Microfluidics with Soft Robotics”