Soft material for soft actuators

By A. Miriyev, K. Stack, Hod Lipson. Nature Communications, 2017

737 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Inspired by natural muscle, a key challenge in soft robotics is to develop self-contained electrically driven soft actuators with high strain density. Various characteristics of existing technologies, such as the high voltages required to trigger electroactive polymers ( > 1KV), low strain ( < 10%) of shape memory alloys and the need for external compressors and pressure-regulating components for hydraulic or pneumatic fluidicelastomer actuators, limit their practicality for untethered applications. Here we show a single self-contained soft robust composite material that combines the elastic properties of a polymeric matrix and the extreme volume change accompanying liquid–vapor transition. The material combines a high strain (up to 900%) and correspondingly high stress (up to 1.3 MPa) with low density (0.84 g cm−3). Along with its extremely low cost (about 3 cent per gram), simplicity of fabrication and environment-friendliness, these properties could enable new kinds of electrically driven entirely soft robots. The development of self-contained electrically driven soft actuators with high strain density is difficult. Here the authors show a single self-contained soft robust composite material that combines the elastic properties of a polymeric matrix and the extreme volume change accompanying liquid vapour transition.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1fe4a8e7cc13b3128d1ce125dae7bf4d965ed151

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In Biomedical Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Soft Robots Manufacturing: A Review (2018, methodology): “From this concept, a solution using an ethanol and silicon emulsion has been proposed (Miriyev et al., 2017).”
Bio-inspired soft robotics: Material selection, actuation, and design (2018, background): “Work Energy Density vs Young’s Modulus of established soft robotic actuator technologies [10,18,19].”
Fluid-driven origami-inspired artificial muscles (2017, positive): “Phase-change materials (both liquid– gas and solid–liquid transitions) have been used to build electrically driven elastomeric artificial muscles (22, 23).”
Developments in 4D-printing: a review on current smart materials, technologies, and applications (2019, background): “Figure 5(a) shows the SA lifting a 1 kg weight in a skeletal bicep configuration [42].”
MakeSense: Automated Sensor Design for Proprioceptive Soft Robots (2019, background): “The ﬁeld of soft robotics has grown rapidly in recent years, with a large body of work focusing on the development of fundamental technologies for sensorizing 1,2,3,4,5,6 , actuating 7,8,9,10,11 , and fabricating 12,13,14,15 soft robots.”
Kirigami skins make a simple soft actuator crawl (2018, background): “3, eaar7555 (2018) 21 February 2018 in this study, the designed stretchable kirigami skins can also be applied to different classes of soft robots, including those based on dielectric elastomers (30, 31), shapememory polymers (32), shapememory alloys (15, 20, 21), and hydrogels (33).”