Advanced Artificial Muscle for Flexible Material-Based Reconfigurable Soft Robots

Zhongdong Jiao, Chao Zhang, Wei Wang, Min Pan, Huayong Yang, Jun Zou

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

91 Citations (SciVal)
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Abstract

Flexible material‐based soft robots are widely used in various areas. In many situations, the suitable soft robots should be rapidly fabricated to complete the urgent tasks (such as rescue), so the facile fabricating methods of the multifunctional soft robots are still in urgent needs. In this work, the origami structure is employed to design vacuum‐powered silicone rubber artificial muscles, which can perform multiple motions, including contraction, bending, twisting, and radial motions. Artificial muscles can be used for rapid reconfiguration of different soft robots, just like the “building bricks”. Based on these artificial muscles, four soft robots with different functions, including an omnidirectional quadruped robot, a flexible gripper, a flexible wrist, and a pipe‐climbing robot, are reconfigured to complete different tasks. The proposed origami artificial muscles offer a facile and rapid fabricating method of flexible material‐based soft robots, and also greatly improve the utilization rate of flexible materials.
Original languageEnglish
Article number1901371
Pages (from-to)1-6
Number of pages6
JournalAdvanced Science
Volume6
Issue number21
Early online date4 Sept 2019
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 6 Nov 2019

Bibliographical note

© 2019 The Authors. Published by WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.

Keywords

  • artificial muscle
  • building bricks
  • flexible materials
  • origami-inspired design
  • reconfigurability
  • soft robots

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Medicine (miscellaneous)
  • General Chemical Engineering
  • General Materials Science
  • Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology (miscellaneous)
  • General Engineering
  • General Physics and Astronomy

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