iRobot has received ample attention for their particle jamming innovations (ie, the "Jamming Blob Robot" and "Jamming Gripper"), created under the now-expired DARPA Chembot program.  However, if you’re like me, their particle jamming actuators and hexapod "JamBot" probably alluded your attention — and they’re stinkin’ cool!   That said, I’d like to introduce you to the "Hexapod JamBot" and the "Jamming Modulated Unimorph (JMU) actuator" created by researchers at iRobot and the Jaeger Group at the University of Chicago.

I’m really excited about inflatable robots… they have the potential to be low-cost,
lightweight, extremely powerful, and yet "human safe" — ie. perfect for many robotics applications.  With that in mind, I would like to introduce you to two new (breakout) inflatable robots: a 15-foot-long walking robot (a Pneubot named Ant-Roach) and a complete, inflatable robot
arm (plus hand).  Both of these robots were developed by Otherlab as part of their "pneubotics" project (in collaboration with Meka Robotics and Manu Prakash at Stanford University), with some funding from DARPA’s Maximum Mobility and Manipulation (M3) program.    These robots use textile-based, inflatable actuators that contract upon inflation into specially-designed shapes to effect motion.   Since these robots are built out of lightweight fabric-and-air structural members and powered via pneumatics or hydraulics, they exhibit large strength-to-weight ratios.  For example, Ant-Roach is less than 70 lbs and can probably support up to 1000 lbs; the inflatable robot arm is less than 2 lbs and can lift a few hundred pounds at 50-60 psi.  Be sure to read on for details and lots of videos!

This article is specifically for folks in academia… When writing a journal paper, targeting the right venue is an important consideration.  There are lots of factors that go into this decision: audience, prestige, historical topics of interest, turn-around time, open access, etc. Discussing all the considerations in detail is too taxing and is probably not actionable (it’s too dependent on your research and goals). But I thought I’d share… I’m tracking the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) impact factors for various robotics journals.  In very general terms, the impact factors can give you a rough approximation of journal quality and help you target your publications.  You can find a historical plot of robotics journals’ impact factors (along with the latest values) below.  I’ll try to keep these up to date.