Soft Actuators Based on Liquid–Vapor Phase Change Composites

Magnetically Assisted Bilayer Composites for Soft Bending Actuators

This article presents a soft pneumatic bending actuator using a magnetically assisted bilayer composite composed of silicone polymer and ferromagnetic particles. Bilayer composites were fabricated by mixing ferromagnetic particles to a prepolymer state of silicone in a mold and asymmetrically distributed them by applying a strong non-uniform magnetic field to one side of the mold during the cur...

Functional Soft Robotic Actuators Based on Dielectric Elastomers

Dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) are a promising soft actuator technology for robotics. Adding robotic functionalities—folding, variable stiffness, and adhesion—into their actuator design is a novel method to create functionalized robots with simplified actuator configurations. We first propose a foldable actuator that has a simple antagonistic DEA configuration allowing bidirectional actu...

Soft Linear Electroactive Polymer Actuators based on Polypyrrole

There is a growing demand for human-friendly robots that can interact and work closely with humans. Such robots need to be compliant, lightweight and equipped with silent and soft actuators. Electroactive polymers such as conducting polymers (CPs) are “smart” materials that deform in response to electrical simulation and are often addressed as artificial muscles due to their functional similari...

Piezoelectric Composites as Bender Actuators

Lead Zirconate Titanate, PZT, layered into a composite with different materials, produces pre-stressed, curved, devices capable of enhanced displacement. This study focuses on Thunder and Lipca which are built using different combinations of constituent materials. Thunder devices consist of layers of aluminum, PZT, and stainless steel bonded with a hot-melt adhesive. Lipca devices consist of ca...

Polypyrrole Soft Actuators