Soft Robotics: A Route to Equality, Diversity, and Inclusivity in Robotics

: Robotics is entering our daily lives. The discipline is increasingly crucial in fields such as agriculture, medicine, and rescue operations, impacting our food, health, and planet. At the same time, it is becoming evident that robotic research must embrace and reflect the diversity of human society to address these broad challenges effectively. In recent years, gender inclusivity has received increasing attention, but it still remains a distant goal. In addition, awareness is rising around other dimensions of diversity, including nationality, religion, and politics. Unfortunately, despite the efforts, empirical evidence shows that the field has still a long way to go before achieving a sufficient level of equality, diversity, and inclusion across these spectra. This study focuses on the soft robotics community-a growing and relatively recent subfield-and it outlines the present state of equality and diversity panorama in this discipline. The article argues that its high interdisciplinary and accessibility make it a particularly welcoming branch of robotics. We discuss the elements that make this subdiscipline an example for the broader robotic field. At the same time, we recognize that the field should still improve in several ways and become more inclusive and diverse. We propose concrete actions that we believe will contribute to achieving this goal, and provide metrics to monitor its evolution

Disclosing gate-opening/closing events inside a flexible metal-organic framework loaded with CO2 by reactive and essential dynamics

We have combined reactive molecular dynamics simulations with principal component analysis to provide a clearer view of the interactions and motion of the CO2 molecules inside a metal-organic framework and the movements of the MOF components that regulate storage, adsorption, and diffusion of the guest species. The tens-of-nanometer size of the simulated model, the capability of the reactive force field tuned to reproduce the inorganic-organic material confidently, and the unconventional use of essential dynamics have effectively disclosed the gate-opening/closing phenomenon, possible coordinations of CO2 at the metal centers, all the diffusion steps inside the MOF channels, the primary motions of the linkers, and the effects of their concerted rearrangements on local CO2 relocations