3D Printed Electrically-Driven Soft Actuators.

ABSTRACT: Soft robotics is an emerging field enabled by advances in the development of soft materials with properties commensurate to their biological counterparts, for the purpose of reproducing locomotion and other distinctive capabilities of active biological organisms. The development of soft actuators is fundamental to the advancement of soft robots and bio-inspired machines. Among the different material systems incorporated in the fabrication of soft devices, ionic hydrogel-elastomer hybrids have recently attracted vast attention due to their favorable characteristics, including their analogy with human skin. Here, we demonstrate that this hybrid material system can be 3D printed as a soft dielectric elastomer actuator (DEA) with a unimorph configuration that is capable of generating high bend

SUBMITTER: Haghiashtiani G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7319180 | biostudies-literature | 2018 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature