Soft Robots in the Real World

After years of development, the grand challenge of autonomous mobile soft robots sits within reach. Enabled by precision 3D printing, novel soft sensors and actuators, and fundamental gains in soft modelling and control, a new generation of soft robots is emerging which can finally make the leap from lab to field. This elusive next step demands a systematic approach to solve key challenges including energy storage and flows, soft state estimation and body-brain codesign, and produce soft robots capable of autonomously perform meaningful tasks in the real-world. 

This special issue aims to bring together leading researchers to identify opportunities and challenges of field deployed soft robots and chart a roadmap towards real world deployments. It is intended to cover all indoor and outdoor and mobile applications of soft robotics, including agricultural, subterranean, environmental monitoring, aquatic, and space applications. 

We invite contributions which extend the state of the art on topics including, but not limited to: 

• Soft Robot Design: Novel designs of robust and adaptable field and mobile soft robots, including computational and automated methods to search the large, non-linear design space and generate high performing soft robots
• Control and Manipulation:  Fundamental developments for precise positioning of soft manipulators and complex soft robots
• Locomotion and Navigation: Leveraging morphological computation to robustly traverse complex terrains and environments
• Simulation: Efficient tools to estimate robot state and behaviour in complex settings.
• Digital Fabrication: Digital techniques for soft robot manufacturing which utilise complex combinations of materials to facilitate morphological computation, embedded sensing or actuation.
• Soft Sensing: Novel flexible sensing systems for autonomous soft robots
• Applications: Demonstrator systems successfully performing real-world tasks
• Benchmarking: Platforms, tools and methods to standardise the assessment of new soft robots and allow objective comparison.

Submissions will be peer-reviewed by a panel of experts and published in the Robotics Reports: Special Issue on Soft Robots in the Real World.  

The deadline for submissions is October 1, 2023. 

Please refer to our Instructions for Authors before submitting your manuscript for submission.

We also encourage submission of papers that have been previously published in conference proceedings, with the requirement that the authors have made significant extensions to the work already published.  Articles submitted to the special issue will be peer-reviewed and published as rapidly as possible. When submitting your manuscript, please select “Special Issue: Soft Robots in the Real Word” as the manuscript type.

Thanks to a generous grant from the Institute for Professional Education, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. will be waiving the Article Processing Charge (APC) for a limited time.