Combining pneumatics with a hydrogel to create a baromorph—for soft robotics

A small team of researchers at Université Paris Diderot has come up with a way to combine pneumatics with a hydrogel to create a baromorph for soft robotics applications—a baromorph is a soft material that self-configures when inflated. In their paper published in the journal Nature Materials, the group describes their research and their geometric creations. Efi Efrati with the Weizmann Institute of Science has written a News and Views piece on the work done by the team in the same journal issue.