The 21st century is experiencing a paradigm change from the age of passive synthetic materials to the age of stimuli-responsive and multi-functional materials. Among them, soft transducers and electromechanically active materials represent a fast growing scientific field of research and development. Soft transducers consist of soft polymeric materials, devices, or systems that react or adapt to external stimulus, such as electrical, magnetic, and mechanical forces. This leads to changes in shape, size, force, stiffness, surface texture, or even colour.<\/p>
These transducers can be used for various needs, including actuation, sensing and energy harvesting. These applications make this research field inherently and highly interdisciplinary, bridging the gap between chemistry and physics of materials, electrical and mechanical engineering, user interface science, and intelligent systems.<\/p>
These technologies will play an increasingly important role in the future, thanks to their unique combination of stimuli-responsiveness and soft structure. They are already opening numerous possibilities of application in various fields, such as soft robotics, biomedical devices, human-machine interaction, wearables, and smart textiles, to name a few. <\/p>
The EuroEAP international conference, organized by the EuroEAP Society with a not-for-profit distinctive character and always held in Europe, primarily aims to share the latest advances and findings in this emerging field. It gathers experts from all over the world in a highly multidisciplinary event driven by scientific quality and industrial impact, with an organization that enables significant opportunities for one-to-one discussions in a friendly atmosphere. Since 2011, the conference has been focused on electromechanically active polymers. Today, the event expands its scope to the larger international and diverse research community of soft smart materials and soft transducers.<\/p>
The goal of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems is to investigate and understand the organizing principles of intelligent systems and the underlying perception-action-learning loop. The Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems combines – within one center – theory, software, and hardware expertise in the research field of intelligent systems. Research at the Stuttgart campus of the institute covers small-scale robotics, self-organization, haptic perception, bio-inspired systems, medical robotics, robotic materials, and physical intelligence; that is, the embodiment of intelligent behavior in physical, rather than computational, systems. <\/p>