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Soft robots have been a buzz word in the field of robotics. However, there are several definitions of soft robots in literature with their varying degrees of usefulness to providing guidelines for designing and constructing a soft robot. This paper attempts to provide a comprehensive definition of soft robots with the goals that the definition should be of (i) generality and (ii) practicality. By generality, it is meant that the definition gives the signature to soft robots and is all inclusive, and by practicality, it is meant that the definition provides a general guideline for practicing designers to design and construct soft robots to particular applications. A salient point in our definition of soft robots is the concept of softness, which is defined from the perspective of a receiving object - particularly as the stress and other damage quantities (e.g., deflection) created in the receiving object when the receiving object interacts with the soft system per se. A further contribution is the provision of definitions to soft sensor, soft actuator along with power generator, soft controller, and soft mechanism. Finally, research issues on soft robots are outlined.

A 33.5 m, 35 kV/2 kArms, 3 phase, warm dielectric HTS power cable system was successfully installed and connected to the China Southern Power Grid at the Puji substation in Kunming on April 19th of 2004, supplying electricity to 4 industrial customers (including 2 metallurgical refineries) and a residential population of about 100,000. In this paper, we will report the key technical parameters and update the operation status of the system.

The topology optimization of a structure with many subdomains is solved by a bionics approach, called as floating interval of reference strain energy density (SED). In practical engineering, a structure to be optimized may have many subdomains and each one is filled with a type of solid material as an initial design. To solve such kind of structural topology optimization, we present a heuristic approach according to bone remodelling theory. The main ideas of the method are as follows. First, the structure to be optimized is considered as a piece of bone and the optimization process of structure is equivalent to the bone remodelling process, in which the distribution of local material in a bone tissue varies when the deformation of tissue goes beyond a so-called dead zone. Second, based on the concept of dead zone, a SED interval is adopted to control the update of local material in structure. Third, to satisfy the constraint(s) of the optimization problem, the reference interval changes in optimization. Particularly, the update of the reference interval is determined by the active constraint of optimization problem. A numerical example is given to show the significance of this kind of optimization problem, finally.