RSA CE&C 2015-2021 Group descriptions

80 3. Personal comfort The field of soft robotics has become an important topic at various prestigious laboratories. Unlike traditional robots that have rigid underlying structures that limit their ability to interact with their environment, soft robots can bend, deform and adapt their size or their elasticity/ stiffness. Often, the comparison is made with materials and constructs found in living organisms. They may deform, either through the initiation of man-controlled triggers or by responding autonomously to changes in their surroundings. These actions of combined sense and response can be accompanied by feedback loops, leading to improved accuracy and often oscillatory and/or nonlinear responses. Soft robots allow for increased flexibility and adaptability for accomplishing tasks which demonstrate potential use in the fields of personal interactions, medicine, biomedical engineering and manufacturing. In the recent period, our group has realized many breakthroughs serving this relatively new field. Using liquid crystal technologies, new polymer materials have been developed that are capable of changing shape, triggered by a variety of stimuli such as light and electricity 23, 24 and magnetic fields. 25 Using light, they could be brought into a continuous, perpetual motion 26,27 capable of transporting or delivering materials. 28 Shaped like small artificial creatures, they could be driven by light to walk, pick up cargo and bring it to remote locations. 29, 30 SFD has also created surface coatings that exhibit dynamic topographies driven by light or by an electrical field generated by buried electrodes that perform a haptic function or could transport or reject particles. 31 Also, electricity-steered materials deposition creates surfaces combining tangible with visible surface effects. In addition, SFD has developed coatings that can secrete liquids on command to mimic, among other things, human skin and that are capable of affecting adhesion and lubrication. 32 Valorization and societal impact SFD takes great pride in developing smart materials and devices that meet societal needs and find application in the fields of sustainable energy, health and personal comfort. The group has been very successful in bringing academic results into industrial practice and societal applications. Many patents have been generated, of which several have resulted in spin-off companies. In addition to the direct transfer of technology, SFD has educated many young students to become scientists, bringing their knowledge to industry or academic institutions. The research of SFD impacts society through: 1. Close collaboration with industry Longstanding collaborations exist with industry, institutes and small & medium-size enterprises and most of our research projects involve industrial partners. The group is well- connected to companies such as DSM, Fujifilm, BASF, Philips, Avery Dennison, Becton & Dickinson, Sabic, Teijin, Evonik, Heijmans, Meta and Merck. SFD has industrial advisors from Merck (Owain Parri), Sabic (Nadia Grossiord), DSM/Covestro (Damien Reardon), DIRM, South China Normal University (Guofu Zhou) among the staff in order to foster and maintain industrial collaborations. 2. Education of professionals . Our graduates find employment at academic institutions and in a wide variety of industries, both local and international and large and small in size. Companies populated by former SFD master’s, PDengs, PhDs and postdocs include Merck, DSM, Philips, Sabic IP, Agfa and ASML, among others. 3. Education of the public . SFD takes pride in its public interactions, bringing their unique science to the general population via large-scale demonstration projects (for example, the SONOB solar noise barrier along a major road in ‘s-Hertogenbosch and the GEM tower, produced in cooperation with the Department of the Built Environment and which has received worldwide attention for its deployment at outdoor music festivals) and participation