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About

Haihui Joy Jiang is a pioneering researcher at the intersection of soft robotics and fluidic control systems, with a particular focus on enabling autonomous, electronics-free soft devices. Her work addresses one of the central challenges in soft robotics: achieving complex, coordinated actuation without relying on rigid electronic components. Jiang's landmark 2019 paper on digital logic for soft devices (299 citations) established a foundation for entirely soft autonomous systems, demonstrating that pneumatic circuits could replicate the functionality of conventional electronic control. Her complementary work on the soft ring oscillator (214 citations) elegantly solved the problem of coordinating multiple pneumatic actuators using only a single constant-pressure source. Building on these breakthroughs, Jiang advanced the field further with programmable soft valves capable of both digital and analog control (86 citations), significantly expanding the versatility of soft control architectures. Her development of tube-balloon logic elements and the Soft Compiler—a web-based design tool for modular pneumatic circuits—reflects her commitment to making soft robotics more accessible and systematically designable. Collectively, her contributions have shaped a new paradigm for untethered, autonomous soft robotic systems, making her an influential voice in next-generation robotics research.