An integrated design and fabrication strategy for entirely soft, autonomous robots

By Michael F. Wehner, Ryan L. Truby, Daniel J. Fitzgerald, Bobak Mosadegh, George M. Whitesides, J. Lewis, Robert J. Wood. Nature, 2016

1,950 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Soft robots possess many attributes that are difficult, if not impossible, to achieve with conventional robots composed of rigid materials. Yet, despite recent advances, soft robots must still be tethered to hard robotic control systems and power sources. New strategies for creating completely soft robots, including soft analogues of these crucial components, are needed to realize their full potential. Here we report the untethered operation of a robot composed solely of soft materials. The robot is controlled with microfluidic logic that autonomously regulates fluid flow and, hence, catalytic decomposition of an on-board monopropellant fuel supply. Gas generated from the fuel decomposition inflates fluidic networks downstream of the reaction sites, resulting in actuation. The body and microfluidic logic of the robot are fabricated using moulding and soft lithography, respectively, and the pneumatic actuator networks, on-board fuel reservoirs and catalytic reaction chambers needed for movement are patterned within the body via a multi-material, embedded 3D printing technique. The fluidic and elastomeric architectures required for function span several orders of magnitude from the microscale to the macroscale. Our integrated design and rapid fabrication approach enables the programmable assembly of multiple materials within this architecture, laying the foundation for completely soft, autonomous robots.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Condensed Matter Physics, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6f25262935362870174bb1feeb37a8e1a3157109

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In Biomedical Engineering

In Condensed Matter Physics

In Mechanical Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Peano-HASEL actuators: Muscle-mimetic, electrohydraulic transducers that linearly contract on activation (2018, background): “However, pneumatic actuators have low efficiency (11) and experience substantial trade-offs between actuation speed and portability, with the response speed of untethered devices being low (2, 22); high-power operation requires rigid and bulky reservoirs or compressors.”
A soft, bistable valve for autonomous control of soft actuators (2018, methodology): “They overcame this problem to some extent by operating the microfluidic circuit with liquid H2O2, which generated, catalyzed by platinum, gaseous O2 inside the robot to increase the volume (23).”