Publications by Herbert Shea | EPFL Graph Search

Wafer-Level Microfabrication of Zipping Electrohydraulic Actuators for Soft Milli-Robots

Miniaturizing soft robots is often limited by scaling down actuators while keeping high energy density and good response time. In this work we demonstrate the wafer-level microfabrication of electrostatic zipping soft actuators, similar to peano-HASELs. Th ...

IEEE2025

Electroadhesion Suction Cups

Herbert Shea

Suction cups are the light bulbs of robotics and automation. They are simple, reliable, yet energy-hungry, and require a bulky and noisy vacuum infrastructure. This work reports Electroadhesion (EA) Suction Cups: soft, silent, monolithic, electrically-driv ...

WILEY-V C H VERLAG GMBH2025

Highly agile flat swimming robot

Herbert Shea, Karen Ann J Mulleners, Mrudhula Baskaran

Navigating and exploring the surfaces of bodies of water allow swimming robots to perform a range of measurements while efficiently communicating and harvesting energy from the Sun. Such environments are often highly unstructured and cluttered with plant m ...

AMER ASSOC ADVANCEMENT SCIENCE2025

Additive Manufacturing of Stretchable Zipping Electrostatic Actuators through Spray Encapsulation of a Frozen Liquid

Herbert Shea, Giulio Grasso

The fabrication of soft fluid-filled systems with mm or sub-mm scale features such as tuneable lenses, microfluidic tactile sensors, and electrohydraulic zipping actuators often relies on manual filling. This final step of injecting fluid limits throughput ...

Wiley2025

Clutchable Fabric Actuator for Energy-Efficient Wearable Robots

Herbert Shea

Energy-efficient yet energy-dense soft actuators are essential for untethered wearable robots. This work reports a fabric-like actuator, combining shape memory alloy (SMA) springs and electrostatic clutches (ESClutches). The SMA springs provide high force ...

2024

Actuating droplets with electrowetting: Force and dynamics

Herbert Shea, Robert Marius Hennig

Electrowetting on dielectric (EWOD) allows rapid movement of liquid droplets on a smooth surface, with applications ranging from lab-on-chip devices to micro-actuators. The in-plane force on a droplet is a key indicator of EWOD performance. This force has ...

2024

Soft Monolithic Shielded Sensors to Measure Shear and Normal Forces for Local Slip Detection

Herbert Shea, Bekir Aksoy, Krishna Manaswi Digumarti

Soft force sensors enable closed loop control or autonomous operation of compliant robot systems. A stretchable force sensing surface containing an array of independent sensor units is reported. This design allows for the measurement of local shear and nor ...

Wiley2024

Permanently magnetized elastomer rotating actuator using traveling waves

Herbert Shea

We report a soft actuator that generates continuous rotation of an object placed on it by electromagnetically exciting circular travelling waves in a soft disk. The disk, that serves as the stator, is made of a stretchable composite consisting of segments ...

Iop Publishing Ltd2024

PopTouch: A Submillimeter Thick Dynamically Reconfigured Haptic Interface with Pressable Buttons

Herbert Shea, Ayana Mizutani, Amir Firouzeh

The interactions with touchscreens rely heavily on vision: The virtual buttons and virtual sliders on a touchscreen provide no mechanical sense of the object they seek to represent. This work presents PopTouch: a 500 mu m thick flexible haptic display that ...

Wiley-V C H Verlag Gmbh2023

Electroadhesive gripping system and method for gripping an object

Herbert Shea, Vito Cacucciolo, Krishna Manaswi Digumarti

An electroadhesive gripping system and a method for gripping and manipulating an object are disclosed. The invention provides a novel approach particularly useful to pick fabrics or otherwise flat and flexible objects including a method relying on electroa ...

2023