Soft Actuators and Haptics

Co-developed HASEL soft actuators

Co-authored multiple highly-cited publications. Formed my masters thesis, and set the precedent for my phd research

Fully-soft, High-speed Electro-hydraulic actuators with muscle-like performance, that can "self-heal" from dielectric breakdown.
This was the first work that invented / demonstrated this entire class of soft actuators, and has been widely replicated across the globe.
Developed many critical parts of the fabrication process to take it from a conceptual design to working devices - including the materials, fabrication strategies, formulating and patterning soft-transparent ion-conducting electrodes, iterating through various geometries
Designed the characterization setups to quantify their mechanical performance, collected and processed data via high-speed imaging, mathematical modeling
Developed rapid-prototyping methods to fabricate them in many different application-specific geometries. The methods that I pioneered have remained the standard-procedure for fabricating these actuators till date.
Check out the publications here in Science Robotics, Extreme Mechanics Letters and Advanced Science
My previous advisor Prof. Christoph Keplinger moved his lab to Max-Planck Institute. (I stayed back in the USA due to personal reasons)

An un-tethered caterpillar-like robot powered by HASEL actuators which work as the muscles, and an un-optimized actuation waveform [UNPUBLISHED]

Crawling robot made of entirely 3D-printed parts using conventional FDM. It has a flexible backbone, rigid legs, and soft HASEL actuators that work as the "muscles".

It illustrates the idea of combining both hard and soft parts to build robots, similar to many animals

active shape-changing Soft surfaces for Haptics

Led this project while interning at Meta (Reality Labs / Oculus) during my PhD. I aimed to make a soft shape-changing surface -- as haptics and visual-feedback even on non-planar surfaces.

This is a concept called "Electro-Elastic Wetting" where the electric field inside a system is locally-varied in a controllable manner to move enclosed fluids precisely.
By changing the local dielectric properties and electric field patterns in different regions, we can produce direction-selective zipping of soft, stretchable electrodes to push fluid in pre-programmable directions, to change the shape of the surface actively.
Check out my publication here in Advanced Functional Materials

This is a demonstration that shows droplet motion even on curved-surfaces -- against gravity! By patterning the dielectric material in the substrate to have a gradient in permittivity, it forces the soft electrodes to zip by different amounts in different regions. This pushes fluids in a pre-programmed direction, without requiring any motors or pumps.

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