Focused Session Invited Speakers

Printing technologies have attracted tremendous attention in the realization of customized soft electronics due to their advantages, such as non-vacuum, low-temperature, and non-contact processability. In this presentation, I would like to present our recent results of printing solid-state elastic conductors into self-supporting three-dimensional (3D) geometries that promise the design diversity of soft electronics, enabling complex, multifunctional, and tailored human-machine interfaces. 

Most skin injuries heal by tissue regeneration and repair. However, in patients with underlying conditions such as diabetes or with vast injuries, healing may be impaired. Impaired wound healing has been responsible for significant financial burden, pain, morbidity, and mortality. 

Chronic nonhealing wounds represent a substantial healthcare burden, with >6 million individuals affected in the United States alone. A chronic wound is defined as one that has failed to heal by 8–12 weeks and is unable to restore function and anatomical integrity to the affected site. 

With global demand for food projected to increase by ca. 50% by mid-century, the agri-food sector must produce this food in an environmentally sustainable manner. This is particularly challenging for an industry that is highly dependent on fossil fuels and where total system losses (waste and inefficiencies) are ca. 50%. It is against this background that Digital Agriculture has a pivotal role to play in enhancing overall operational efficiency. The agri-food sector comprises several stages, a continuum, from on-farm production, through processing, retail, the consumer (citizen) and beyond into an agri-food bioeconomy. 

For decades we’ve been hearing about the promise of printing electronics directly onto any surface.  However, despite significant progress in the development of inks and printing processes, reports on fully, direct-write printed electronics continue to rely on excessive thermal treatments and/or fabrication processes that are external from the printer.  In this talk, recent progress towards print-in-place electronics will be discussed; print-in-place involves loading a substrate into a printer, printing all needed layers, then removing the substrate with electronic devices immediately ready to test [1].

A soft and sensitive tactile skin is fundamental component of robots to perceive their surrounding environments physically. Although numerous tactile sensors have been demonstrated on a 2-D plane, a soft skin that can be integrated on complex, 3-D surface of a robot body is yet stagnated due to various fabrication challenges. Recently, a tomographic tactile sensing inspired by biological tactile perception mechanism has emerged as a promising approach to practically realize soft robot skin. This approach simplifies the tactile sensor design through computation, making it easier to integrate on a robot body. This talk introduces the fundamentals of tomographic tactile sensing and its potential in robotic skin research. 

What would we be able to do if we could build electronically integrated machines the at a scale of 100 microns? At this scale, semiconductor devices are small enough that we could put the computational power of the spaceship Voyager onto a machine that could be injected into the body. Such robots could have on board detectors, power sources, and processors that enable them to sense, interact, and control their local environment. In this talk I will describe several cutting edge technologies we are developing to achieve this vision.  

Minimally invasive surgical (MIS) procedures pose significant challenges for robots, which need to safely navigate through and manipulate delicate anatomy while performing complex tasks to treat tumors in remote areas. Soft robots hold considerable potential in MIS given their compliant nature, inherent safety, and high dexterity. Yet, a significant breakthrough of soft robots in surgery is impeded by current limitations in the design, manufacturing, and integration of soft materials that combine actuation, sensing, and control. This talk will illustrate our work towards achieving safe navigation, distal actuation, integrated sensing, and effective force transmission in MIS by highlighting different classes of soft surgical robots, i.e., soft continuum robots, soft-foldable robots, and soft reactive skins with applications in lung cancer, colorectal cancer, and brain cancer surgery.

Wearable, flexible electronic devices have received tremendous attention in recent years because of their in situ and real-time monitoring capabilities of human health parameters and mobile activities in a non-invasive or minimally invasive manner. However, the immaturity of the technique for seamless and intimate integration of electronics with the human body hampers prolonged device wearing. 

Large-scale, straightforward wet-spinning of two-dimensional (2D) materials has emerged as a promising direction for processability to develop meter-long dimensional fibers. For example, graphene fibers (GFs) have great potential in future portable wearable electronics, which have gained considerable attention owing to high electrical conductivity, lightweight, tiny volume, outstanding mechanical flexibility, excellent deformability, low cost, and the ability to be woven into smart textile fabrics.