@article{qing_chi_hong_zhao_qi_li_yin_2024, title={Fully 3D-Printed Miniature Soft Hydraulic Actuators with Shape Memory Effect for Morphing and Manipulation}, ISSN={["1521-4095"]}, DOI={10.1002/adma.202402517}, abstractNote={Miniature shape-morphing soft actuators driven by external stimuli and fluidic pressure hold great promise in morphing matter and small-scale soft robotics. However, it remains challenging to achieve both rich shape morphing and shape locking in a fast and controlled way due to the limitations of actuation reversibility and fabrication. Here, fully 3D-printed, sub-millimeter thin-plate-like miniature soft hydraulic actuators with shape memory effect (SME) for programable fast shape morphing and shape locking, are reported. It combines commercial high-resolution multi-material 3D printing of stiff shape memory polymers (SMPs) and soft elastomers and direct printing of microfluidic channels and 2D/3D channel networks embedded in elastomers in a single print run. Leveraging spatial patterning of hybrid compositions and expansion heterogeneity of microfluidic channel networks for versatile hydraulically actuated shape morphing, including circular, wavy, helical, saddle, and warping shapes with various curvatures, are demonstrated. The morphed shapes can be temporarily locked and recover to their original planar forms repeatedly by activating SME of the SMPs. Utilizing the fast shape morphing and locking in the miniature actuators, their potential applications in non-invasive manipulation of small-scale objects and fragile living organisms, multimodal entanglement grasping, and energy-saving manipulators, are demonstrated.}, journal={ADVANCED MATERIALS}, author={Qing, Haitao and Chi, Yinding and Hong, Yaoye and Zhao, Yao and Qi, Fangjie and Li, Yanbin and Yin, Jie}, year={2024}, month={Jun} }
 @article{hong_zhao_berman_chi_li_huang_yin_2023, title={Angle-programmed tendril-like trajectories enable a multifunctional gripper with ultradelicacy, ultrastrength, and ultraprecision}, volume={14}, ISSN={["2041-1723"]}, DOI={10.1038/s41467-023-39741-6}, abstractNote={AbstractAchieving multicapability in a single soft gripper for handling ultrasoft, ultrathin, and ultraheavy objects is challenging due to the tradeoff between compliance, strength, and precision. Here, combining experiments, theory, and simulation, we report utilizing angle-programmed tendril-like grasping trajectories for an ultragentle yet ultrastrong and ultraprecise gripper. The single gripper can delicately grasp fragile liquids with minimal contact pressure (0.05 kPa), lift objects 16,000 times its own weight, and precisely grasp ultrathin, flexible objects like 4-μm-thick sheets and 2-μm-diameter microfibers on flat surfaces, all with a high success rate. Its scalable and material-independent design allows for biodegradable noninvasive grippers made from natural leaves. Explicitly controlled trajectories facilitate its integration with robotic arms and prostheses for challenging tasks, including picking grapes, opening zippers, folding clothes, and turning pages. This work showcases soft grippers excelling in extreme scenarios with potential applications in agriculture, food processing, prosthesis, biomedicine, minimally invasive surgeries, and deep-sea exploration.}, number={1}, journal={NATURE COMMUNICATIONS}, author={Hong, Yaoye and Zhao, Yao and Berman, Joseph and Chi, Yinding and Li, Yanbin and Huang, He and Yin, Jie}, year={2023}, month={Aug} }
 @misc{chi_li_zhao_hong_tang_yin_2022, title={Bistable and Multistable Actuators for Soft Robots: Structures, Materials, and Functionalities}, volume={34}, ISSN={["1521-4095"]}, DOI={10.1002/adma.202110384}, abstractNote={AbstractSnap‐through bistability is often observed in nature (e.g., fast snapping to closure of Venus flytrap) and the life (e.g., bottle caps and hair clippers). Recently, harnessing bistability and multistability in different structures and soft materials has attracted growing interest for high‐performance soft actuators and soft robots. They have demonstrated broad and unique applications in high‐speed locomotion on land and under water, adaptive sensing and fast grasping, shape reconfiguration, electronics‐free controls with a single input, and logic computation. Here, an overview of integrating bistable and multistable structures with soft actuating materials for diverse soft actuators and soft/flexible robots is given. The mechanics‐guided structural design principles for five categories of basic bistable elements from 1D to 3D (i.e., constrained beams, curved plates, dome shells, compliant mechanisms of linkages with flexible hinges and deformable origami, and balloon structures) are first presented, alongside brief discussions of typical soft actuating materials (i.e., fluidic elastomers and stimuli‐responsive materials such as electro‐, photo‐, thermo‐, magnetic‐, and hydro‐responsive polymers). Following that, integrating these soft materials with each category of bistable elements for soft bistable and multistable actuators and their diverse robotic applications are discussed. To conclude, perspectives on the challenges and opportunities in this emerging field are considered.}, number={19}, journal={ADVANCED MATERIALS}, author={Chi, Yinding and Li, Yanbin and Zhao, Yao and Hong, Yaoye and Tang, Yichao and Yin, Jie}, year={2022}, month={May} }
 @article{hong_chi_wu_li_zhu_yin_2022, title={Boundary curvature guided programmable shape-morphing kirigami sheets}, volume={13}, ISSN={["2041-1723"]}, DOI={10.1038/s41467-022-28187-x}, abstractNote={AbstractKirigami, a traditional paper cutting art, offers a promising strategy for 2D-to-3D shape morphing through cut-guided deformation. Existing kirigami designs for target 3D curved shapes rely on intricate cut patterns in thin sheets, making the inverse design challenging. Motivated by the Gauss-Bonnet theorem that correlates the geodesic curvature along the boundary with the Gaussian curvature, here, we exploit programming the curvature of cut boundaries rather than the complex cut patterns in kirigami sheets for target 3D curved morphologies through both forward and inverse designs. The strategy largely simplifies the inverse design. Leveraging this strategy, we demonstrate its potential applications as a universal and nondestructive gripper for delicate objects, including live fish, raw egg yolk, and a human hair, as well as dynamically conformable heaters for human knees. This study opens a new avenue to encode boundary curvatures for shape-programing materials with potential applications in soft robotics and wearable devices.}, number={1}, journal={NATURE COMMUNICATIONS}, author={Hong, Yaoye and Chi, Yinding and Wu, Shuang and Li, Yanbin and Zhu, Yong and Yin, Jie}, year={2022}, month={Jan} }
 @article{chi_hong_zhao_li_yin_2022, title={Snapping for high-speed and high-efficient butterfly stroke-like soft swimmer}, volume={8}, ISSN={["2375-2548"]}, DOI={10.1126/sciadv.add3788}, abstractNote={Natural selection has tuned many flying and swimming animals to share the same narrow design space for high power efficiency, e.g., their dimensionless Strouhal numbers St that relate flapping frequency and amplitude and forward speed fall within the range of 0.2 < St < 0.4 for peak propulsive efficiency. It is rather challenging to achieve both comparably fast-speed and high-efficient soft swimmers to marine animals due to the naturally selected narrow design space and soft body compliance. Here, bioinspired by the flapping motion in swimming animals, we report leveraging snapping instabilities for soft flapping-wing swimmers with comparable high performance to biological counterparts. The lightweight, butterfly stroke–like soft swimmer (2.8 g) demonstrates a record-high speed of 3.74 body length/s (4.8 times faster than the reported fastest flapping soft swimmer), high power efficiency (0.2 < St = 0.25 < 0.4), low energy consumption cost, and high maneuverability (a high turning speed of 157°/s).}, number={46}, journal={SCIENCE ADVANCES}, author={Chi, Yinding and Hong, Yaoye and Zhao, Yao and Li, Yanbin and Yin, Jie}, year={2022}, month={Nov} }
 @article{li_zhao_chi_hong_yin_2021, title={Shape-morphing materials and structures for energy-efficient building envelopes}, volume={22}, ISSN={["2468-6069"]}, DOI={10.1016/j.mtener.2021.100874}, abstractNote={Buildings account for 30% of global energy consumption. Improving the energy efficiency of buildings becomes essential to reducing energy consumption for alleviating their deteriorating impacts on the environment. As one of the key elements, the building envelope is essential to reducing the building energy consumption. Recent researches have demonstrated the promise of environmentally adaptive shape-morphing building envelopes in enhancing energy efficiency over the conventional stationary ones. In this review, we briefly discuss the recent advances in energy-efficient shape-morphing building envelopes from both structural designs and engineering materials viewpoints for energy saving and energy harvesting. For structural designs, we discuss the designs and performances of four representative categories of shape-morphing building envelopes, including conventional dynamic façades with simple rigid motions, biomimic adaptive structures, reconfigurable kirigami/origami-based structures, and morphable wrinkling surface–based smart windows. For materials design, we discuss the typical materials and design strategies used for actuating the shape-morphing building envelopes and smart windows. We expect that this brief review will be insightful for developing future shape-morphing building envelopes to make buildings more energetically efficient, comfortable, and environmentally friendly.}, journal={MATERIALS TODAY ENERGY}, author={Li, Yanbin and Zhao, Yao and Chi, Yinding and Hong, Yaoye and Yin, Jie}, year={2021}, month={Dec} }
 @article{chi_tang_liu_yin_2020, title={Leveraging Monostable and Bistable Pre-Curved Bilayer Actuators for High-Performance Multitask Soft Robots}, volume={5}, ISSN={["2365-709X"]}, DOI={10.1002/admt.202000370}, abstractNote={AbstractSoft actuators are typically designed to be inherently stress‐free and stable. Relaxing such a design constraint allows exploration of harnessing mechanical prestress and elastic instability to achieve potential high‐performance soft robots. Here, the strategy of prestrain relaxation is leveraged to design pre‐curved soft actuators in 2D and 3D with tunable monostability and bistability that can be implemented for multifunctional soft robotics. By bonding stress‐free active layer with embedded pneumatic channels to a uniaxially or biaxially pre‐stretched elastomeric strip or disk, pre‐curved 2D beam‐like bending actuators and 3D doming actuators are generated after prestrain release, respectively. Such pre‐curved soft actuators exhibit tunable monostable and bistable behavior under actuation by simply manipulating the prestrain and the biased bilayer thickness ratio. Their implications in multifunctional soft robotics are demonstrated in achieving high performance in manipulation and locomotion, including energy‐efficient soft gripper to holding objects through prestress, fast‐speed larva‐like jumping soft crawler with average locomotion speed of 0.65 body‐length s−1 (51.4 mm s−1), and fast swimming bistable jellyfish‐like soft robot with an average speed of 53.3 mm s−1.}, number={9}, journal={ADVANCED MATERIALS TECHNOLOGIES}, author={Chi, Yinding and Tang, Yichao and Liu, Haijun and Yin, Jie}, year={2020}, month={Sep} }
 @article{tang_chi_sun_huang_maghsoudi_spence_zhao_su_yin_2020, title={Leveraging elastic instabilities for amplified performance: Spine-inspired high-speed and high-force soft robots}, volume={6}, ISSN={["2375-2548"]}, url={https://publons.com/wos-op/publon/37034085/}, DOI={10.1126/sciadv.aaz6912}, abstractNote={Bistable spined soft robots enable high-speed cheetah-like galloping and fast-speed swimming, as well as high-force manipulation.}, number={19}, journal={SCIENCE ADVANCES}, author={Tang, Yichao and Chi, Yinding and Sun, Jiefeng and Huang, Tzu-Hao and Maghsoudi, Omid H. and Spence, Andrew and Zhao, Jianguo and Su, Hao and Yin, Jie}, year={2020}, month={May} }