Stiffening iron particles to modulate physical interactions.

ABSTRACT: Variable rigidity is vital for autonomous hardware systems to interact with unstructured environments, which allows them to be both soft and rigid depending on their motor intent. Extensive research has focused on granular jamming, owing to its excellent shape adaptability for irregular three-dimensional objects. However, previous approaches relying on pneumatic actuation suffered from limitations, such as slow jamming transitions and heavily tethered system designs. Here, we propose a magnetic field-based granular jamming principle, aiming to achieve rapid and precise stiffness tunability with an electrically driven modular hardware design. Our proposed concept incorporates a magnetorheological membrane, size-mixed soft magnetic particles, an optimized electromagnet, and a thin-film force

SUBMITTER: Song C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12647603 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature