Soft actuator technology inspired by invertebrate locomotion may enable the Army’s next generation of reconnaissance robots to more-stealthily slip through cracks and track bad guys.
In pursuit of military superiority on the battlefield, engineers from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) and the Univ. of Minnesota (UMN) took a page straight from nature’s playbook as their inspiration to develop soft, flexible actuators that mimic natural movements of invertebrates such as worms or squid.
To achieve the complex modes of flexible motion the Army wants for its next-generation robots, a team led by Michael McAlpine developed a key enabling technology: a soft, electrically driven actuator based on layered sheets of 3D-printed ionic hydrogel-elastomer hybrid materials.
The team printed the hybrid materials in a unimorph configuration — an active dielectric elastomer layer sandwiched between two electrodes was stacked on a passive layer. This prototype...
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