Robotic Materials: From smart polymers to computational metamaterials

We describe “robotic materials”, a new class of metamaterial that tightly integrate sensing, actuation, computation, communication and power routing in a periodic fashion. Instead of relying on a strict division between mechanism, sensors, and control system, robotic materials allow a unified approach to robot design, customization and manufacturing. Robotic materials shift the complexity of manufacturing to the foundry, which provides functional raw materials in the forms of sheets, rods and bars. Possible functionalization include the ability to sense at high spatial resolution, the ability to change shape and appearance, or to perform distributed computation. We illustrate such materials using three examples: a sensing skin that can sense texture, a bar that can change its shape, and a rubber belt that can move autonomously. We then describe manufacturing challenges of robotic materials and survey recent advances in the field that have the potential to make robotic materials ubiquitous and cheap.