Actuators for Robotics

The Actuators for Robotics Section provides a wide and multidisciplinary vision on cutting-edge approaches, new methods, and advanced technologies to induce robot motion. Topics cover all levels of the development and scale of actuators, from transduction principles/phenomena (including constitutive equations) to advances in material/chemical aspects to enhance transduction and more complex actuation concepts to better exploit the transduction principle. Hardware of interest includes effectors, but also transducers integrated with efficient energy sources (autonomous effectors), with motion converters (motors), or both (autonomous motors). Actuation technologies of any kind are welcome, from more traditional technologies, such as those of an electromechanical, electromagnetic, and hydraulic/pneumatic nature, to innovative technologies based on piezoelectricity, shape memory materials, flexible fluidic actuators, electro-active polymers and supercoiled polymers (active), and electro-magnetorheological fluids/elastomers, jamming transition, and low-melting-point materials (semiactive). On the software side, topics of interest include novel control algorithms applied to actuators and actuation/motion control systems that are expected to improve robot abilities, from manual control and wireless to semiautonomous and fully autonomous approaches, including artificial intelligence, such as machine learning methods (deep learning, clustering, Bayesian methods, reinforcement learning, and genetic algorithms).

The audience of Actuators for Robotics is interested in all aspects of actuators, with implications for the robotic systems that they are integrated into, from components to complete systems and platforms deployed on real scenarios. Preference will be given to studies with solid and rigorous experimental validation on hardware.

Other areas covered by the Section include the following:

• Advanced design approaches and tools for modeling, including numerical approaches, bioinspiration/biomimetics, and embodied intelligence.
• Manufacturing and assembly techniques at all scales, especially those with a limited number of manual phases.
• Sustainability, recyclability, reusability, and disassembly.
• Benchmarking, test protocols, and standards.