Dr. Ronan Hinchet

Research area

Ronan use Functional Materials and Smart Structures to develop new Soft Electrostatic Transducers that I apply to Soft Robotics and Wearable Human Machine Interfaces.

- Functional materials and smart structures

I focus on high performance dielectric materials structured at various scale from nano to macro, and combined into composites to improve and enable innovtive functions in electrostatic transducers. I am also interested in material integration into smart structures based on elastomer, textiles and scales that are shaped thank to 3D printing technologies. 

- Soft electrostatic transducers and artificial muscles

I develop soft electrostatic actuators, sensors and energy harvesters that are directly integrated for human machine interface and haptic applications, or combined into soft artificial muscles to be integrated into soft robotic applications. This include FEM multiphysics simulations, material processing and enginering, integration and charaterization steps to achieve state-of-the-art performances. I concentrate on the use of thin film fabrication techniques and more and more 3D printing to fabricate innovative functional structures. 

- Soft Robotics and Wearable Human Machine Interfaces

I target soft robotic applications and especially musculoskeletal systems and wearable human machine interfaces. I put an amphasis on multimaterial 3D printing to create musculaskeletal systems, and on textile integration coupled with additive manufacturing to design new wearable systems.