Soft materials for robotics

Innovations in soft materials design and engineering are delivering promising functional components for advanced soft robotic applications.

New classes of functional soft materials show promise to revolutionize robotics. Now materials scientists must focus on realizing the predicted performance of these materials and developing effective and robust interfaces to integrate them into highly functional robotic systems that have a positive impact on human life.

An interplay between deswelling and buckling in a polymer gel is harnessed to achieve sequential snap events for repeatable jumping motion, opening the door to autonomously moving soft robots.

Coupled liquid-crystalline network oscillators incorporating light-responsive molecules show synchronized motion when stimulated by light. This behaviour resembles that of synchronized clock pendulums and may find uses in advanced soft robotics applications.

Elastomers swollen with solvent repeatedly snap back and forward as the solvent evaporates, which is harnessed to fabricate polymeric devices that jump autonomously.

Upon light stimulation, two jointed liquid crystalline network oscillators affect the movement of each other, achieving synchronized in-phase and anti-phase oscillations that can be explored to generate soft actuators with collective responses.

A framework for the elastohydrodynamic lubrication between soft patterned surfaces identifies the contributions of substrate elasticity and pattern geometry for friction, which have implications for the engineering of haptic soft materials.