Soft Ultrathin Electronics Innervated Adaptive Fully Soft Robots |
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| Authors: | Chengjun Wang Kyoseung Sim Jin Chen Hojin Kim Zhoulyu Rao Yuhang Li Weiqiu Chen Jizhou Song Rafael Verduzco Cunjiang Yu |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA;2. Department of Engineering Mechanics and Soft Matter Research Center, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China;3. Materials Science and Engineering Program, University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA;4. Institute of Solid Mechanics, Beihang University, Beijing, China;5. Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA;6. Key Laboratory of Soft Machines and Smart Devices of Zhejiang Province, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China;7. Department of Materials Sciences and Nano Engineering, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA;8. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA |
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| Abstract: | Soft robots outperform the conventional hard robots on significantly enhanced safety, adaptability, and complex motions. The development of fully soft robots, especially fully from smart soft materials to mimic soft animals, is still nascent. In addition, to date, existing soft robots cannot adapt themselves to the surrounding environment, i.e., sensing and adaptive motion or response, like animals. Here, compliant ultrathin sensing and actuating electronics innervated fully soft robots that can sense the environment and perform soft bodied crawling adaptively, mimicking an inchworm, are reported. The soft robots are constructed with actuators of open‐mesh shaped ultrathin deformable heaters, sensors of single‐crystal Si optoelectronic photodetectors, and thermally responsive artificial muscle of carbon‐black‐doped liquid‐crystal elastomer (LCE‐CB) nanocomposite. The results demonstrate that adaptive crawling locomotion can be realized through the conjugation of sensing and actuation, where the sensors sense the environment and actuators respond correspondingly to control the locomotion autonomously through regulating the deformation of LCE‐CB bimorphs and the locomotion of the robots. The strategy of innervating soft sensing and actuating electronics with artificial muscles paves the way for the development of smart autonomous soft robots. |
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| Keywords: | adaptive artificial muscle soft electronics soft robots |
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