ABSTRACT: Robots have been proposed to relieve humans from dangerous environments
or tedious manufacturing processes, or mimic humans or animals in appearance,
behavior, and/or cognition to conduct service jobs. Most of traditional robots use hard
materials. Inspired by natural creatures, researchers recently have become more and
more interested in soft robots, which are made of soft materials, say polymers. To
exploit animal-like locomotion and behavior, it is essential to develop muscle-like
actuators with properties close to biological systems. We recently have employed
dielectric elastomers – one class of soft active materials – as artificial muscles. A dielectric
elastomer actuator can deform in response to voltage, and can exhibit unique attributes,
including large voltage-induced deformation, fast response, low weight, quiet operation,
etc. In this seminar I will discuss several soft bio-inspired robots which are developed
based on dielectric elastomer actuators, such as a jellyfish robot and artificial muscles for
expressive robots, etc. I will also introduce our preliminary progress on modelling and
control of soft actuators and soft robots.

BIO: Dr. Jian Zhu is currently an associate professor at the School of Science and
Engineering, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. Before that, he worked as an
assistant professor at the National University of Singapore. He received a Ph.D. degree in
Mechanical Engineering at University of Alberta, Canada in 2008, and then worked as a
postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. His current research focuses on Soft Intelligent
Robots, Bio-inspired Robots, and Smart Materials and Structures. Dr. Jian Zhu is an
associate editor of IEEE Robotics Automation Letters, a guest editor of IEEE Transactions
on Industrial Electronics, and a committee member of SPIE EAPAD (Electroactive Polymer
Actuators and Devices) conference.