Papers
95
Total Citations
4,395
H-Index
35
About
Xiangyang Zhu is a leading robotics researcher whose work spans soft robotics, smart materials, robotic grasping, and human-machine interfaces. He has made pioneering contributions to the development of soft actuators and robots, most notably demonstrating the world's first tethered soft wall-climbing robot capable of scaling wood, paper, and glass surfaces — a landmark achievement that has garnered over 660 citations. His highly cited survey on dielectric elastomer actuators (471 citations) has become an essential reference for researchers entering the soft robotics field, while his modeling work on viscoelastic electromechanical behavior in soft DEAs has advanced predictive design frameworks for muscle-like systems. Zhu has further broadened the field through investigations into stimuli-responsive functional materials, programmable pneu-net actuators, and auxetic metamaterial-based soft systems. His interdisciplinary reach extends into biomedical engineering, with impactful contributions to ionogel-based touch sensing for prosthetics and myoelectric neural interfaces for upper-limb amputees. Earlier foundational work on force-closure grasp synthesis remains influential in dexterous manipulation research. Collectively, his publications have accumulated thousands of citations, reflecting sustained and far-reaching influence across both fundamental robotics science and translational biomedical applications.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1Soft wall-climbing robots663 citations · 2018
- 2A survey on dielectric elastomer actuators for soft robots471 citations · 2017
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- 4Stimuli-responsive functional materials for soft robotics244 citations · 2020
- 5Synthesis of force-closure grasps on 3-d objects based on the Q distance194 citations · 2003
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- 9Design of a cable-driven hyper-redundant robot with experimental validation89 citations · 2017
- 10Programmable soft bending actuators with auxetic metamaterials84 citations · 2020