Recently, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) held its 2021 International Conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft) online, hosted by Yale University. The Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) participated in the competition and their team won the first prize in the locomotion competition category.

The participating team of SUSTech was spearheaded by Hongqiang WANG, Associate Professor of the Department of Mechanical and Energy Engineering (MEE). The members of the team included Yuxuan LIAO, Hanwen ZHANG, Shuyuan WANG, Yiming ZHANG, Shangkun GUO, and Songhao HUANG, all of whom are undergraduates of MEE. The technical consultants of the team contained Renjie ZHU, Ting WANG, and Diancheng LI.

The competition attracted teams from well-known universities and laboratories within China and abroad, including Yale University, Intel Lab, the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), and Seoul National University (SNU).

The competition was composed of three categories: manipulation, locomotion, and wearables. The soft robot put forward by SUSTech in the competition was mainly composed of bellows and directional fibrillar pads with a special mechanical design. Driven by air pumps, the robot can achieve high efficiency and fast crawling. It is able to navigate a wide variety of terrains such as slopes, sand, and narrow roads. In addition, the robot can survive from a strong impact due to the purely soft design.

RoboSoft aims to bring together the soft robotics community to present and discuss recent innovations across disciplines and foster collective advancement of the field.