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Unlike traditional hard grippers, soft robotic grippers are commonly made of soft materials so that the soft grippers can produce motion via elastic deformations of their compliant components. The advantages of compliance allow soft grippers to effectively eliminate shocks caused by hard contact, which usually occurs when a hard robotic gripper manipulates a hard object. Until now, the soft robotic grippers are able to operate numerous objects with irregular geometries and different textures. Besides, with the help of embedded sensors, soft robotic grippers have facilitated the growing automation of many tasks, which are thought to be far too delicate for robotic manipulation. This paper reviews the advancement in soft robotic grippers. The paper first introduces the actuation technologies followed by the design and fabrication techniques. The use of 3D printing techniques in the fabrication of the soft gripper is also discussed. The Review then highlights the challenges and future outlook in the fabrication of soft grippers and sensors. Nanyang Technological University Submitted/Accepted version This work was partly supported by the Schaeffler Hub for Advanced Research at NTU, under the ASTAR IAF-ICP Programme ICP1900093.

This paper introduces an implemented affective social robot, called CuDDler. The goal of this research is to explore and demonstrate the utility of a robot that is capable of recognising and responding to a user's emotional acts (i.e., affective stimuli), thereby improving the social interactions. CuDDler uses two main modalities; a) audio (i.e., linguistics and non-linguistics sounds) and b) visual (i.e., facial expressions) to recognise the user's emotional acts. Similarly, CuDDler has two modalities; a) gesture and b) sound to respond or express its emotional responses. During the TechFest 2012 event, CuDDler successfully demonstrated its capability of recognising the user's emotional acts and responding its expression accordingly. Although, CuDDler is still in its early prototyping stage, the preliminary survey results indicate that the CuDDler has potential to not only aid in human-robot interaction but also contribute towards the long term goal of multi-model emotion recognition and socially interactive robot.

This paper presents a user study on an implemented Internet-based teleoperation robot named TeleBot. The objectives of the study were to: a) test the usability of TeleBot, b) compare two commonly used devices to control TeleBot, and c) understand further development and requirement of TeleBot by examining how operators use TeleBot to complete a specific task. A task-oriented user study that included navigating TeleBot to a specific location and use TeleBot's arm to touch a “X” marking placed on the door, was designed. Eight participants performed the same task using two different types of device. Both objective and subjective data were collected during the study. The results indicated that a) TeleBot demonstrated a certain level of usability; b) showed that the gamepad was slightly easier to use for teleoperation and finally c) deduced further developmental area for TeleBot.