Soft Actuators and Robots that Are Resistant to Mechanical Damage
By R. V. Martinez, Ana C. Glavan, Christoph Keplinger, Alexis I. Oyetibo, George M. Whitesides. 2014
241 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This paper characterizes the ability of soft pneumatic actuators and robots to resist mechanical insults that would irreversibly damage or destroy hard robotic systems—systems fabricated in metals and structural polymers, and actuated mechanically—of comparable sizes. The pneumatic networks that actuate these soft machines are formed by bonding two layers of elastomeric or polymeric materials that have different moduli on application of strain by pneumatic inflation; this difference in strain between an extensible top layer and an inextensible, strain‐limiting, bottom layer causes the pneumatic network to expand anisotropically. While all the soft machines described here are, to some extent, more resistant to damage by compressive forces, blunt impacts, and severe bending than most corresponding hard systems, the composition of the strain‐limiting layers confers on them very different tensile and compressive strengths.
Subfields: Biomedical Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/32212380e97d3964b3fadee4d109b328b5b9568d
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Citations in the corpus
- 4D printed thermally activated self-healing and shape memory polycaprolactone-based polymers (2018, methodology): “However, mechanical properties of printed PCLDMA-UPyMA samples, repaired following the procedure detailed in the Experimental Section are still adequate for applications as soft actuators [57,58].”
- Design and Analysis of a Soft Pneumatic Actuator with Origami Shell Reinforcement (2016, unknown): “Thus, despite the resilience in material used, 8,12,13 robots fabricated with soft materials are highly susceptible to punc-tures and other mechanical failures when inflated under harsh conditions, 10 or when subjected to large deformations.”