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Journal articles

• Z. Ren, S. Kim, X. Ji, W. Zhu, F. Niroui, J. Kong, and Y. Chen, “High Lift Micro-Aerial-Robot Powered by Low Voltage and Long Endurance Dielectric Elastomer Actuators,” Advanced Materials, p. 2106757, 2022. (Cover Article)
• S. Kim, Y-H. Hsiao, Y. Lee, W. Zhu, Z. Ren, F. Niroui, and Y. Chen, “Laser-assisted failure recovery for dielectric elastomer actuators in aerial robots,” Science robotics 8, no. 76, eadf4278, 2023. (Cover Article)
• Y. Chen, S. Xu, Z. Ren, P. Chirarattananon, “Collision resilient insect-scale soft-actuated aerial robots with high agility,” IEEE Transactions on Robotics, vol. 37, no. 5, pp. 1752–1764, 2021. (Best Paper)
• Z. Ren, M. Zarepoor, X. Huang, A. P. Sabelhaus, C. Majidi, “Shape Memory Alloy (SMA) Actuator with Embedded Liquid Metal Curvature Sensor for Closed-Loop Control,” Frontiers in Robotics and AI, vol.8, pp. 9, 2021.

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Conference papers

• X. Huang, W. Huang, Z. Patterson, Z. Ren, M. K. Jawed and C. Majidi, “Numerical Simulation of an Untethered Omni-Directional Star-Shaped Swimming Robot,” in 2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pp. 11884-11890. IEEE, 2021.
• Z. Ren, J. Yang, S. Kim, Y-H. Hsiao, J. Lang, and Y. Chen, “A lightweight high-voltage boost circuit for soft-actuated micro-aerial-robots.” In 2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pp. 3397-3403. IEEE, 2023.
• X. Huang, Z. Ren, and C. Majidi, “Soft thermal actuators with embedded liquid metal microdroplets for improved heat management,” in 2020 3rd IEEE International Conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft), pp. 367-372. IEEE, 2020.
• Z. Ren, H. Wang, and W. Chen, “Frog-inspired hind limb for jumping robots,” in 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics (ROBIO), pp. 605-610. IEEE, 2017.