Advancing Soft Actuation Technologies: Reproducible Characterization and Benchmarking for Tactile-Driven Intelligent Systems

Dear Colleagues,

Background Overview

Soft robots increasingly sense and act through the same compliant body: the material that deforms to grip an object is also the material that reports the contact. The field is beginning to shift toward these tactile-driven architectures, in which touch perception and actuation are co-designed rather than bolted together. Progress, however, is difficult to accumulate. A soft tactile actuator is typically hand-fabricated, characterized on a bespoke test rig, and reported through metrics defined for that device alone, so a sensitivity, hysteresis, or blocked-force figure from one laboratory rarely transfers to another. Compliance makes this harder rather than easier: contact conditions, preload, and viscoelastic history all shape the measurement and are seldom reported in enough detail to repeat it. Reproducible practice is therefore not a bookkeeping concern for this field but a precondition for it; until a device can be rebuilt from its recipe and re-measured under a stated protocol to the same numbers, claims about tactile-driven intelligence cannot be compared, and cannot be built upon.

Aims and Scope

This Special Issue collects recent advances in soft actuation technologies for tactile-driven intelligent systems, with a deliberate emphasis on work that can be reproduced. By reproducibility we mean two concrete and checkable things: that the hardware can be rebuilt by another group from the information provided—open designs, materials, and fabrication routes, including additive and otherwise automated manufacturing that reduces build-to-build variance—and that its performance can be re-measured by another group to the same numbers, under a stated characterization protocol, a documented test setup, and reported metrics. We therefore welcome papers that contribute the devices themselves (soft actuators, tactile-feedback mechanisms, bioinspired and morphing hardware) and, equally, papers that contribute the means of evaluating them: characterization pipelines, benchmarking metrics, open test rigs, datasets and datasheets, and replication or negative-result studies. Original research articles, short communications, and reviews are all in scope.

Topics of interest for publication include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Soft actuators, compliant manipulators, and flexible fluidic driving mechanisms.
• Tactile-feedback actuation mechanisms and integrated physical intelligence.
• Active, shape-morphing, and reconfigurable surface-based manipulation hardware.
• Bioinspired kinematic designs and biological blueprints for compliant motion.
• Origami-inspired structures, deployable mechanisms, and smart material actuation.
• Wearable and on-body haptic actuators with integrated tactile feedback.
• Additive and automated manufacturing of soft actuators, and its effect on build-to-build variance.
• Standardized characterization frameworks and open test rigs for soft actuators and tactile systems.
• Benchmarking metrics for force, displacement, hysteresis, and material reliability.
• Open datasets, datasheets, and reporting standards (FAIR practice) for soft tactile hardware.
• Replication studies, reproducibility assessments, and negative results.

Dr. Matteo Lo Preti
Dr. Bokeon Kwak
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Actuators is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• soft actuators and manipulators
• tactile-feedback actuation mechanisms
• bioinspired actuation and kinematics
• benchmarking and characterization of soft robots
• reproducibility and open hardware
• additive manufacturing of soft robots
• pneumatic and flexible fluidic actuators
• reconfigurable hardware and origami mechanisms
• compliant structures and smart materials
• wearable haptic actuation